Use distributed, federated services like Lemmy, mastodon etc.
Support the hosts with our own funds.
Moderate our own communities.
The second point is the most important. Reddit happened because they are a corporate entity seeking profit. Let's own our social media platforms by actively contributing funds to them.
Honestly never liked Twitter so mastodon was like meh. But as dorky as it sounds Reddit was fun, even went to some of the meetups back in the day when it was smaller, etc. I’m now seeing the light on the federated / dWeb scene more clearly now.
Totally agree we need a new grassroots web. The classic internet is way too centralized now and is about to become a pit of GPT-generated nonsense clogging up search engines. Stoked to jump in and support these new communities!
Since you mentioned Twitter and GPT, I’m also not very much of a Twitter guy, but I open it sometimes just because.
Jesus Christ, EVERY POST is filled with lots of people just quoting the GPT bots to “answer” for them some ironic shit. People can’t even be bothered to even interact with a post of their interest anymore.
It doesn’t seem like an issue yet, but I’m interested to see how the fediverse combats the inevitable GPT spam it’ll start receiving as it grows and misinformation/advertising becomes more attractive on these platforms. It’s not an easy problem to solve (though handling it better than Elon should be pretty easy lmao).
As someone who never got to experience the web as so many remember it (before it became centralized and primarily monetized), I’m quite excited at the prospect of Lemmy and the Fediverse in general. Maybe my generation and those to come can come to know a better internet.
With the initial blackout, there was at least some vague hope they would listen. But then we got to July 1st with them quadrupling down and here we are.
Is that really true? I navigated to the Reddit page just a minute ago and there is a ton of activity in the subs I was using before I deleted my account. There are new communities on here that were created to mimic subs over there and it’s pretty telling: Little to no activity on the communities over here but a lot of activity on the Reddit subs that are being mimicked. I’m asking myself if the people that are leaving Reddit are mostly tech people, that either work in an industry related to technology or are super enthusiastic about tech. My go-to subs were humanities related on Reddit. Those are still super active over there.
Got it. Yea i think the migration is really for the people that use third-party apps and the people that support them. reddit is fine its just how they act toward people who are litterally moderating and giving to the community by using third-party apps. i modded my sub from rif and apollo early on. We realized that u/spez was in total control and realized we couldn’t do anything about it. we tried to protest but of course we are little fish. now we got lemmy and kbin. witch is actually better cause you arne’t jus stuck to one platoform. yes people are mimicking reddit cause thats all we know. but give it time and we will stop talking about it. i say about 1 month or so. you will still see the people talk about reddit burning in hell lol and stuff but that’s about it. the blackout brought out I think the real techies and then after the api yesterday and today closed the reset that used third-party apps and everyone that dosen’t like where reddit is going are coming over now. #fediverse is huge and we didn’t know about!
But you want this to be true because you were a Reddit moderator. I’m very sorry to say to you that you volunteered for a job that, although it was a lot of work, isn’t going to compensate you. Your desire for revenge against Reddit isn’t going to be fulfilled any time soon. The good news is that some other corporation seeking profit will probably purchase Reddit and kill it, replacing it with something else. So you’ll live long enough to see that day. Don’t you feel better now?
Like, whatever. Personally, you identified yourself as a moderator on Reddit. You failed to say which subs you moderated. So, I’ll toss you in the bin of indifference, because, as you might know, Reddit mods are not popular depending on the subs and age group popularity. I’m not here to support you. I’m here because I hate Reddit. It’s a different thing. Your moderation efforts on Reddit were because you decided to perform them. I don’t care about you.
why do you feel the need to tell me this? I am not arrogant. I am tired of the whining from mods from reddit. they won’t say anything verifiable. until they do, I won’t care about what they say. they need to say who they were on reddit and what they moderated. otherwise, they are just randos.
Reddit moderators are upset and downvoting my comments because they are powerless. Did you know that your downvotes don’t really matter? This website is buggy as shit and you can still see my reply to you on the front page and search for it on lemmy, because you were dumb enough to not check your preferences. Duh! Some Reddit moderators. Can’t even use the internet the right way.
Neat! People keep using Reddit except its moderators. If you openly disregard Reddit’s moderators on here, you get downvoted. No Karma here. Sorry, former moderators of Reddit. You can negatory me to the moon. On here, if you want to play the “I was a moderator on Reddit” card, put your cards on the table and say what you were moderating. Evidently, not in your best interest. Otherwise, you’d be moving over here with pride. You’d say openly what you moderated, why you moderated it, and all that. It’s just enough for you right now to say you moderated on Reddit. That’s not going to cut it for you on here, where nobody cares much and there is no karma and where you can’t really do much to me for voicing my opinion about you and your subreddit. That’s why you won’t say what subreddits you moderated. You just hope I care because you were a moderator on there. Well, no. I want to know more. You moderated on there. Which subreddit? Make it verifiable. Then we’re talking turkey. Otherwise, who caresP
Same… I think as the Lemmy apps mature and if Reddit quality decreases, then we could see more of an exodus. My hope is that apps might make it more accessible. It’s the Wild West.
I think there is a lot of hype going on here about migrations tbh. Lemmy is cool and all but reddit is certainly still generating/aggregating way more content and its where most lemmy content is originating at this moment. I think for now the tech folks are here setting up, a few of us are bumbling around discovering this, and everyone else is still on reddit. I am not a very techy person myself and lemmy is a weird system to wrap your mind around coming from reddit and I can see how people may not bother, especially this early. Just choosing an instance and then finding communities is like an absolute mindmelter if you’re used to reddit and its’ easy to see why people on reddit would not be keen to move away.
Honestly there’s no reason to not use both if you wish. Just like Lemmy instances, you don’t have to choose a single one to base your entire online time around you can have accounts everywhere and enjoy it all.
I will say though there has been a noticeable difference in the discussion quality on Lemmy. I don’t get this vibe that everybody is attacking me and looking for opportunities to shit on me when posting on here, which is hella refreshing at least.
Yes. I’m one of the many who kept using Reddit throughout the blackout, but once third party apps were killed, I would have to go out of my way to download the official Reddit app and relearn all the muscle memory browsing habits anyway, so why even bother? WefWef is great and I kinda despise the shit a Reddit pulled with their abrupt price hike.
My daily browsing on Reddit went from probably 1-2 hours of day to … well it’s not been long enough to tell but so far I’ve only viewed the site once from my laptop. My mobile use is now completely Lemmy.
In truth if I’m being honest with myself, most posts, even in my beloved communities, were just turning into 90% bot ads; it’s gotten more and more obvious over time and I was ignoring it for so long but Reddit really is a husk if what it was and kinda has been for awhile. As a 12 year user, it’s hard to leave it behind but I’m slowly learning whatever the fuck all this is. Godspeed to everyone here!
Ditto, I said at the time, people are lazy including myself and I wasn’t going to leave my account for a 2 day protest, spez was right when he said it would blow over. But once RIF stopped working, well guess what I’m also to lazy to download and navigate their shitty app, so here I am wefwef isn’t perfect, preferred rif, but at least it’s not bloated.
It’s really, really smart that it looks like Reddit in terms of page layout. It satisfies the brain that likes its patterns and routines. I even put my favorite Lemmy app right where I used to launch from to satisfy the muscle memory. I really hope this sticks.
Lol well while you’re at it, if you’re interested in PS2 games, and more specifically a niche gem called Kinetica why not check out my currently bugged and suffocated community? lemmy.world/c/kinetica 😃😂
I mean to contribute distributed resources to existing instances. Not so much make new ones. Assuming Lemmy has a protocol for distributed resources built on something like the raft consensus algorithm.
I’m mobile ATM, so not at home, trying to learn as I go. The goal being by the time I’m home I’ll know enough to provision resources if such a concept is a thing.
I have a whole cluster at home with business internet, so plenty of ready to go resources 🤔
Contributing distributed resources to existing instances is an interesting concept.... I suppose it could be setup like traditional load balancing in a tradition web application environment.
I am absolutely in love with the federated aspect of all of this though, and contributing resources that way. However, I fear that it might limit the size of any one community or instance to a point that it will never be exactly like reddit, in terms of huge monolithic communities for certain hobbies, etc. Which whether that's good or bad is another discussion.
Allowing the contribution of resources to existing instances could be a political/social/interpersonal nightmare too though, where fighting and threats of removing resources could be used as influence.... which would drive people into the existing federated system we already have. So IDK. its an interesting discussion but I don't know if its the greatest idea yet or not.
For example what if I have a ton of money and am able to contribute more server resources to kbin.social than even kbin.social (or anyone else) can manage.... I now basically own and control the platform, and could pull the rug out from underneath it if I don't like something thats happening....
The only "resource" we can contribute to existing instances is really just money. And maybe some volunteer technical support. Or... start our own separate instance.
I think I've managed to debate myself out of thinking what you're thinking is a good idea though.....
Another example about why this is an interesting debate and question though: There are currently multiple "wallstreetbets" wanabees.... Its very fragmented. Nobody knows where to go. If there was an easy way through the interface to create my own "combined communities community" (combining multiple copy-cat communities across multiple instance), so I can see every post from everyone, like it was all one place. There is absolutely sort of ways to do that now, but it needs to become easier and more streamlined. That would still mean the communities are fragmented, owned, and moderated by different people. But if one goes off the rails I can just remove it from my master "wallstreetbets monolith" list. But at least that way I can view it as one single "resource" and one single community, despite being separate instances and servers.
Let me know if you find a way to do this. It's a super cool concept and I would love to contribute. This seems like the only way to sustainably run big instances.
It works for wikipedia, and that’s a big, monolithic organization. The distributed nature of Lemmy makes it more possible to run off donations, because individual instances are smaller and require less exotic hardware. They don’t have to store the entire corpus of Lemmy content, etc, etc. Smaller instances means less human resources and attendant management. I think most of these instances are still run by volunteers as passion projects.
I don’t think that will work as instances start getting to the million user mark. 10M… I’m interested to see 1) if Lemmy actually gets that big and 2) if users condense on one or a handful of super-instances or some other form of organization develops.
I can imagine, for example, Electronic Arts starting their own instance for arms-length game sites that might attract a large swath of people, or Nikon sponsoring an instance that specializes in photography and imaging-related communities.
Karma is an inherently destructive thing for many reasons. For people, it is a representation of other people’s approval of you, so they’ll do anything to boost that number as highly as possible, even going so far as to make fake karma farming accounts, create botnets to upvote themselves and downvote opponents in arguments, and post garbage content instead of engaging in meaningful conversation with other people. For corporations, it’s a marketing tool they can exploit to manipulate public opinion, by creating or buying high-karma accounts to convince people to buy shit, or to mass downvote people who point out flaws in their arguments or products, or figure out what they’re planning and try to call them on it. They can use karma to discredit opponents, astroturf, and even sway elections indirectly. It’s one of the reasons why civil and political discourse have completely collapsed in the USA.
Thanks for the reply. I’d never really cared about my Karma so it is interesting to hear about the issues it can cause. I think your right, Lemmy would probably be a better place without it.
Thanks for the reply. I’d never really cared about my Karma so it is interesting to hear about the issues it can cause. I think your right, Lemmy would probably be a better place without it.
Thanks for the reply. I’d never really cared about my Karma so it is interesting to hear about the issues it can cause. I think your right, Lemmy would probably be a better place without it.
Thanks for the reply. I’d never really cared about my Karma so it is interesting to hear about the issues it can cause. I think your right, Lemmy would probably be a better place without it.
I’ve always followed the old reddiquette: if the comment is contributing to the discussion, upvote it. Even if you disagree with it. Reddiquette used to be a big part of reddit, but stopped maybe 10 years ago
I don’t think karma was ever really that big of an issue, the problem was the belief that karma meant something. Mods and admins treated karma like it meant legitimacy, like a sybil test, and it’s not. Also the upvote/downvote system got so destroyed by misuse and a complete disregard for reddiquette, and often gets combined with karma, but that’s a seperate issue.
The points never really mattered until people decided they did.
Ok, so, admittedly, I haven’t taken much time to read up on what I can do with Lemmy.
However, by the sound of it, I can set up an instance on whatever server I desire. From that instance I can moderate the content accordingly to how I want, including automation. Users can sign up on my Lemmy instance, or I can participate in other discussions from Lemmy users on other instances.
This also means I could make an app for my specific lemmy server, and tweak it as to how I see it. Or shit, I could keep myself as the only user ok that lemmy instance if I really wanted.
I take it all the stuff for lemme is right there on Github, so When the little one has down time I’ll start digging in
Second option is difficult because there are too many instances. It is difficult to make good use of the funds as the popular instances will eventually enjoy too much profit whilst the smaller instances will be forced to shutdown due to lack of funds. This will lessen the decentralisation overtime.
The solution is a central service, something like Lemmy Fund Management or something, which regulates the funds accordingly. The managers will be selected by voting system (democracy). There are other solutions as well.
Unsure how distributed federated services prevents the reddit downfall, aside from corporate greed. Which can also be solved through legally binding agreements/foundation-controlled companies. Among many other solutions that can avoid funding, stability, and consistency issued federated services have and will continue to have.
It’s all a tradeoff. To tradeoff corporate greed you now have community fragmentation and fragility risks as any instance can be taken down whenever, and any unhappy user that created communities can solely kill them off (As stated by some users threatening to do so in another thread).
What you should be talking about is how do you mitigate these tradeoffs. What should others do to make the fediverse more successful? If you want it to be successful than talking about these hard problems in a semi-flenal way is required.
#2 sounds good to say, but barely works in practice when you’re talking about infrastructure costs in the tens of millions of $ per year for something at scale…
Essentially saying nice things that don’t effectively translate into reality doesn’t solve problems. It just perpetuates a lack of critical thinking.
OK good point but think about your tone dude! You’re coming across like you think we are stupid and I’ll offer the benefit of the doubt that you don’t intend that side effect.
My tone is such that it addresses the nativity of posts like this. Especially when said nativity pushed for potentially counterproductive or harmful mindsets that prevent real solutions from being discovered.
Nativity must be addressed if hard problems are to be solved. It’s a baseline.
A small slice of users are going to understand broader technological, community, funding, and survivability nuances. As such these should be explained so we’re not simply hand waving necessary complexity away. Encouraging deeper discussion from others who would otherwise pass posts like these up because of the low quality.
It’s the difference between talking about niceties, vs actually working towards solutions. These are hard problems, and should be recognized as hard otherwise they go unsolved.
The more readers know about the rest of the iceberg the better. The more knowledgeable folks you attract to a discussion by encouraging critical thinking the better.
My tone is such that it addresses the nativity of posts like this. Especially when said nativity pushed for potentially counterproductive or harmful mindsets that prevent real solutions from being discovered.
Nativity must be addressed if hard problems are to be solved. It’s a baseline.
A small slice of users are going to understand broader technological, community, funding, and survivability nuances. As such these should be explained so we’re not simply hand waving necessary complexity away. Encouraging deeper discussion from others who would otherwise pass posts like these up because of the low quality.
It’s the difference between talking about niceties, vs actually working towards solutions. These are hard problems, and should be recognized as hard otherwise they go unsolved.
The more readers know about the rest of the iceberg the better. The more knowledgeable folks you attract to a discussion by encouraging critical thinking the better.
This needs to be the way forward. The community needs to own itself, support itself, etc. The alternative is what just happened where the community is abused for someone else's gain.
I agree to a point, but this is also how you get communities that are REALLY easy to squash. Because they’re fragile and incoherent. Bad actors can easily overwhelm them, astroturf, go after hosting…etc and small self funded communities won’t have the manpower, tools, or resources to combat it.
You want to build a strong community that lasts, and is resilient.
So how do we make our communities more resilient, well resourced, less fragmented, and also accessable for member growth?
I don’t see how that is possible in the fediverse.
Let’s say I like fishing and a fishing community exists in five instances… That fragmentation you can’t avoid… In the other hand it helps with the resilient part I guess. The more fragmented it is the harder it will be to take a community down.
Having multiple communities under the same subject in different instances will soon become normal, for better or for worse.
I have read some comments in github discussing possible ways to develop something akin to “mutireddits” (or more recently custom feeds) so people can group communities like this across different instances.
Let’s see how all this plays out. Interesting times ahead in the fediverse.
I’ve functionally mass-subscribed to every community that overlaps with my primary interests regardless of which instance it is on and make use of the feature to view submissions from subscribed communities.
The fragmentation is frustrating because it makes individual communities seem less populated than the topic actually implies. For example, there are multiple large Games communities across the biggest instances, but as they are not on the same instance, people are likely to participate in a subset of all of the available communities. This generally reduces the volume of participation in any one community, even if the volume across all those communities summed up is very substantial.
A “multireddit” at the community level would be quite nice (rather than the process of subscribing to a large number of communities and using the “subscribed” feed).
For real, can we assist with hosting using our own servers as distributed nodes? I have business fiber and plenty of dedicated compute just hanging around. I’d happily host nodes to assist with stability, redundancy, and general compute/networking.
You literally can just download the Lemmy program and install it on any computer you want to use as a server. I used to run Mastodon servers a few years ago, and it’s not without its hurdles, but with some Linux knowledge and a little bit of server admin knowhow, you absolutely could.
You’d need a computer you’re gonna use as a server, put Linux on it, then install NginX or Apache on it, then Lemmy, then set everything up and get a domain name to attach to the computer’s IP. Question mark, profit. It might be a bit of an oversimplification, but with some research and work, it can be done.
I mean to contribute distributed resources to existing instances. Not so much make new ones.
I’m mobile ATM, so not at home, trying to learn as I go. The goal being by the time I’m home I’ll know enough to provision resources if such a concept is a thing.
I have a whole cluster at home with business internet, so plenty of ready to go resources 🤔
I mean to contribute distributed resources to existing instances. Not so much make new ones. Assuming Lemmy has a protocol for distributed resources built on something like the raft consensus algorithm.
I’m mobile ATM, so not at home, trying to learn as I go. The goal being by the time I’m home I’ll know enough to provision resources if such a concept is a thing.
I have a whole cluster at home with business internet, so plenty of ready to go resources 🤔
I mean to contribute distributed resources to existing instances. Not so much make new ones. Assuming Lemmy has a protocol for distributed resources built on something like the raft consensus algorithm.
I’m mobile ATM, so not at home, trying to learn as I go. The goal being by the time I’m home I’ll know enough to provision resources if such a concept is a thing.
I have a whole cluster at home with business internet, so plenty of ready to go resources 🤔
Lemmy isn’t distributed like that. Each instance does its own user and community management with local storage and processing. The community content - posts and comments - gets distributed to any other instance that asks for it, and that instance then presents it to its users. The result is that the content is replicated & distributed across many instances, and the load of presenting that content to users is shared.
So, running your own instance, where you’re the only user, will cause that instance to fetch whatever communities you’ve subscribed to via API. That probably reduces, slightly, the load on those servers, but it’s not going to be a huge effect.
Running your own instance and getting a dozen or a hundred friends to use it instead of lemmy.world or feddit.de, on the other hand…
Isn’t that a hard barrier/limit to scale then (as well as support)? Would it even be possible to run say a 1 million user Lemmy instance since it can only scale vertically?
I mean to contribute distributed resources to existing instances. Not so much make new ones. Assuming Lemmy has or is using an existing protocol for distributed resources, such as the raft consensus algorithm.
I’m mobile ATM, so not at home, trying to learn as I go. The goal being by the time I’m home I’ll know enough to provision resources if such a concept is a thing.
I have a whole cluster at home with business internet, so plenty of ready to go resources 🤔
I mean to contribute distributed resources to existing instances. Not so much make new ones. Assuming Lemmy has or is using an existing protocol for distributed resources, such as the raft consensus algorithm.
I’m mobile ATM, so not at home, trying to learn as I go. The goal being by the time I’m home I’ll know enough to provision resources if such a concept is a thing.
I have a whole cluster at home with business internet, so plenty of ready to go resources 🤔
I mean to contribute distributed resources to existing instances. Not so much make new ones. Assuming Lemmy has or is using an existing protocol for distributed resources, such as the raft consensus algorithm.
I’m mobile ATM, so not at home, trying to learn as I go. The goal being by the time I’m home I’ll know enough to provision resources if such a concept is a thing.
I have a whole cluster at home with business internet, so plenty of ready to go resources 🤔
I mean to contribute distributed resources to existing instances. Not so much make new ones. Assuming Lemmy has or is using an existing protocol for distributed resources, such as the raft consensus algorithm.
I’m mobile ATM, so not at home, trying to learn as I go. The goal being by the time I’m home I’ll know enough to provision resources if such a concept is a thing.
I have a whole cluster at home with business internet, so plenty of ready to go resources 🤔
I mean to contribute distributed resources to existing instances. Not so much make new ones. Assuming Lemmy has a protocol for distributed resources built on something like the raft consensus algorithm.
I’m mobile ATM, so not at home, trying to learn as I go. The goal being by the time I’m home I’ll know enough to provision resources if such a concept is a thing.
I have a whole cluster at home with business internet, so plenty of ready to go resources 🤔
I mean to contribute distributed resources to existing instances. Not so much make new ones. Assuming Lemmy has a protocol for distributed resources built on something like the raft consensus algorithm.
I’m mobile ATM, so not at home, trying to learn as I go. The goal being by the time I’m home I’ll know enough to provision resources if such a concept is a thing.
I have a whole cluster at home with business internet, so plenty of ready to go resources 🤔
I mean to contribute distributed resources to existing instances. Not so much make new ones. Assuming Lemmy has a protocol for distributed resources built on something like the raft consensus algorithm.
I’m mobile ATM, so not at home, trying to learn as I go. The goal being by the time I’m home I’ll know enough to provision resources if such a concept is a thing.
I have a whole cluster at home with business internet, so plenty of ready to go resources 🤔
I mean to contribute distributed resources to existing instances. Not so much make new ones. Assuming Lemmy has a protocol for distributed resources built on something like the raft consensus algorithm.
I’m mobile ATM, so not at home, trying to learn as I go. The goal being by the time I’m home I’ll know enough to provision resources if such a concept is a thing.
I have a whole cluster at home with business internet, so plenty of ready to go resources 🤔
One of my biggest concerns about Lemmy is the seeming inability to prevent astroturfing by various groups. I also wonder how it will survive when (not if) they receive GDPR fines, legal holds from law enforcement organizations, and a variety of other legal and regulatory topics that Lemmy (or at least the instance owner) is subject to even if the user base doesn’t believe that to be the case.
Hopefully the donation model will allow enough funding to address the realities of running a popular service.
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