It's time to admit Lemmy has won the "the biggest reddit alternative" award, why it's time for all of us to consider supporting it (here's why) + reopening r/LemmyMigration
https://old.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/18x59m7/its_time_to_admit_lemmy_has_won_the_the_biggest/Open linkView original on lemmy.nz1837
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I was looking for a Reddit alternative for years. I would have been cool with anything non-corporate, but figured it would take ages to build.
It’s incredible what Lemmy has turned into so quickly. A Reddit alternative went from being impossible to actually existing within a matter of weeks.
As much as that makes a great story... The groundwork for lemmy goes back years. It's true that lots of issues were addressed and client apps were ported after Reddit started going down hill, but a ton of work was done beforehand to make that all possible.
For me, this can't be overstated. I don't work in an office/at a stationary computer and 99.9% of my Reddit time was mobile. I checked out the "mobile apps" for Lemmy, and hated them. I probably wouldn't be active here at all if it wasn't for good dedicated apps like Sync.
I haven't used Reddit since the blackout. Thankfully Sync for Lemmy was out within a few weeks. Sort by TopDay and there's enough content on here to scratch my itch.
Boost for Lemmy as well
Damn straight. I tried out Jerboa and was so disappointed that until Lemmy Sync was announced I just assumed I would no longer have a Reddit style app for a while.
Voyager for Lemmy is really good and open source. You should try it, might get a better mobile experience.
Will do, thanks!
You can also have a look at https://lemmyapps.netlify.app/
There should be one that you'll like
Lurks in sync
Well said
Work started on lemmy way back before lemmy could be a good alternative to Reddit
I agree with you on the technology part of it, but I'm wondering if OP meant "existing" as in how relevant of a social media platform it becomes.
Plus building it is kind of the easy part -- the hard part is getting people to migrate over and having enough active posts / users that people feel it's worth their time to stay and post as well. Migration will inevitably splinter communities as well, especially small ones, where not enough people move over (or don't move quickly enough). I've seen so many alternatives where the userbase was too small or not posting enough or just right wing trolls or the site was unusably buggy. lemmy managed to be good enough in all those categories at the perfect time - when reddit spat in the face of their users.
It's the niche topics that need more activity. I love science - mostly space/physics - and it's mostly a ghost town. Once the unique corners grow their activity, it's going to be great.
I would have assumed spacey topics would sell like hot buns.
I guess Physics are more of a niche and you would probably find more armchair physicists here than actual physicists.
If things need more activity try posting, it works great
Agree.
Even simple things like subs for particular cars/car brands were thriving on Reddit but don’t exist here.
I wish there was a better way to port communities over here. There are people complaining that Lemmy shouldn’t copy Reddit (I say, why not?), but then there’s legitimate complaints about homesteaders running to Lemmy and snatching up all the popular subreddit names.
Assuming you mean copying posts from reddit: Because, without the person that originally posted the question or topic, it feels like there's little point in discussing the topic. I was subbed to a cycling-related community that copied every post from an equivalent reddit sub, and it had zero comments. I'd start to write a comment from time to time and it was like, "What's the point? OP isn't going to see this response."
Oh, I meant more copying communities. Like people want Lemmy to replace reddit, but also to be completely unique from reddit or something.
Yeah, I don't see a problem with that. Unfortunately there's just not much momentum in the hobby/specific interest communities yet.
except no one comment and no one posts
Regarding the content problem, I see the repost bots are still active, I wish they could be either turned off or have their rates severeöy limited.
At first glance they make Lemmy seem active and vibrant, but since they are just bots few people vote on the posts and fewer comment on them, they post so much the any original Lemmy content in those communities gets drowned out by the bots reposting Reddit threads.
During the influx of users after the apikalypse these bots where probably needed to not scare people that there was zero content from different subreddits, but now they just seem to be holding those communities hostage.
Easiest is yo block them, so they won't show up in your feed.
Yeah, I know, but they make Lemmy look like a place full of fake content
I mean... not entirely. I've been on quite a few reddit alternatives over the years. Most of them passion projects by indie devs, and start struggling the moment they hit 4 digit users. Ruqqus was nicknamed "dumpster fire" because it would go down every time a new wave from reddit came over.
The software existed for years, but yes the instances that popped up and the dev work to make it actually sorta stable at scale did happen quite quick.
This couldn't have been possible without the help of Spez and all the board responsible for the APIcalypse, thank you very much!
What if he was secretly a good guy?
Spez being wholesome? The plot twist of the year.
Directed by M. Night Shamalyan
It’s what makes me want to donate to keep my home server alive. It’s the first open source thing that I’ve ever donated to, and I now have a monthly donation to help try to keep this alive since Lemmy is the alternative we all deserve.
Impossible? The only moat with Reddit was the userbase, the site is just a link sharing site with nested comments…
I know this comment could receive some negative feedback, but Lemmy lacks diversity in its userbase, compared to Reddit (or Tumblr in the old times). It's just a feeling, when I scroll through comments and posts on Lemmy, I picture most of the users as 16-46 yo white males.
EDIT: changed "45" to "46", see comment below.
That’s the vibe I always got from Reddit. But yeah, the vibe I get from Lemmy is that there are two demographics.
19-45 white male tech enthusiast and 19-45 white trans female tech enthusiast.
I'm not sure yet which one I am ಠ_ಠ
Oh damn, your certification ran out?
Which is interesting. On the early days of Digg it was the same demographic, although more politically center. Then in the early days of reddit the same thing happened. It was mostly Linux and tech. So having the same starting demo is not a bad thing, but the question is, will it grow to adopt others
cmon dont call me out like that :3
I think Lemmy skews towards the younger end though. Of course I could be very mistaken as this impression is entirely unscientific and is based solely on the levels of knowledge and general discourse that are prevalent on Lemmy.
To my eye, a large percentage of Lemmy's users are both relatively low-information and lacking in real life experience. They also tend to be very ideological which in my experience is something that tends to diminish with age.
Again, I could be very wrong about this.
There's also the leftists who decide very narrowly what opinions will be tolerated! Don't forget them!
Hey that's me :D
It's such a hilariously leftist trope to fuck up your own community's growth with purity tests
Eh, some communities are more/less leftist than others. There'll always be a cutoff point of course, and that's necessary.
News and World News are my two main communities. Those are communities that, in any serious community-building sense, should be heavily moderated so as not to alienate normals.
Right? With friends like these...
The only material I've seen heavily moderated by leftists is misinformation, regardless of political orientation (although American conservatism is more heavily moderated since much of it IS demonstrably misinformation currently).
I'm willing to be proven wrong if you have any examples you could recommend.
I just wish the rules were clearer. I've posted memes that I thought were in good taste but if the content has to do with a minority group then you better be fanatically praising them. That's one of the reasons I stopped posting to ![email protected] .
although i'm a white male in the age group i am neither of these... i know you didn't say everyone is in these groups, just here to represent us anti trans folks who don't know shit about computers. And they say commenting helps lemmy grow, so i'm doing that too.
"anti trans"
You mean "non trans" ('cis' being the technical term), right? "anti trans" implies hostility towards trans folk
Check some recent comments, they used the correct term to describe themselves.
i believe this to be satire... i hope
That's how Reddit was for a long time too, and Reddit still is more like that than the other social networks. For whatever reasons that demo is more likely to be early adopters of this kind of platform. Diversity comes with growth.
Because Reddit was made for nerds, until more recently it didn't try to attract the mass with shiny interfaces and promises of social recognition like FB and Instagram.
This is where the major problem is. Most people simply don't care about anonymously discussing stuff. It's always about status. You simply have to show off your flashy avatar and your NFTs.
I like how reddit thought NFTs were going to save them
I mean the whole concept of the fediverse is inherently going to attract the more paranoid of people who don't want to have big tech down their throat 24/7. The people most aware of this are those that work in/adjacent to big tech, and have enough understanding to be genuinely concerned about the state of the internet. Not that you have to be in tech to use/enjoy the Fediverse, but Lemmy is inherently inconvenient and less content rich than Reddit so it's going to create more niche/less diverse communities who have common interests.
Tech also has a very large trans demographic compared to the general population, and you can see that reflected on Lemmy too. The whole platform is largely going to reflect tech demographics until it is well known by the general public.
I'm just glad most people here are nice and willing to have open discussions. I've seen more threads of people disagreeing and reaching common ground than anywhere else.
I also don't really want Lemmy to get as big or have the same exact demographic as Reddit. I do want it to get bigger and more diverse than it currently is since there's still not enough activity (although it's way way better than it was) and not enough niches. There are only so many star Trek memes I want to see.
One issue with Lemmy is that it's too anonymous that it doesn't really support content creators who actually want to be known. I know influencer is a bad word, but platforms do need people to share original content, and there's less motivation to do really high effort, high quality content when you can't verify yourself. Lemmy has no lack of memes but nobody is using it as a platform for quality OC that takes more than a few minutes to create. I think that could be fixed by there being an instance dedicated to hosting verified users for people who want a non anonymous account, so when you see a user is from that instance, you know they're the real deal, and that would encourage content creators to establish a presence. Right now, how am I supposed to know a handle is legit when there are thousands of instances that can have the same usernames, and people can even create their own instance?
I think you're right, maybe I'm just being impatient. I just appreciate the mix of points of view, I think it helps to see things differently.
Diversity doesn't come when the userbase is outright hostile to outsider POV.
Why does it feel like every pocket of the Internet is a separate echo chamber these days. I just want to hear nuanced opinions that aren't on either extreme of the political spectrum.
I get more of an impression that lemmy is full of far left leaning programmers. I think that is a good subset of people to have on a social media platform. But if we had more subs on other topics it should bring in other types of people.
The reason you don't get many "normal" people here is that the community is absurdly hostile to anyone on the "normal person" spectrum.
If you're not a software-pirating techbro obsessed with "privacy," a leftist, or a furry, this place generally shits on you.
I very frequently post incredibly lukewarm takes for any mainstream community, and literally get called a Nazi. I have stalkers lol.
I, personally, tend to have "normal" views but significantly more resilience to online communities than "normal" people - which is why I still come here. Most normal people left back before this place even defederated from Hexbear. They ain't coming back.
Until mods of what are essentially "default" communities get serious about growth instead of wanting "their" spaces, Lemmy is never going to grow. Most people don't find getting blasted with piss-takes by Marxists funny the way I do.
Case-in-point from this thread
https://lemmy.world/comment/6400270
Oh and one directed at me, right on schedule.
I block those people all the time here and it's made the experience very enjoyable. It's a small enough community where blocking is highly effective.
If you care about downvotes, then I could see your point about the Fediverse being hostile to some more mainstream opinions. I’ve made some pretty vanilla comments about markets/politics that have gotten downvoted for not being left-wing, but I don’t really care about that.
I’ve never been called a “nazi”, but I don’t go out of my way to antagonize anyone and try to add to the conversation and if my reply is something along the lines of “socialism sucks and you suck” then I don’t post it.
I think what it comes down to though is that the fediverse experience requires some curation and restraint compared to other larger platforms where you can go pretty much unoticed and can pretty much always find a group of people of similarly ideologically minds
Is that actually desirable or just growth for growths sake? Rage comics and lolcats brought huge numbers of new users to reddit and the quality of content immediately began to decay.
Maybe a social media site that runs out of content is a good thing.
Not much we can do about that. That's just the demographic an experimental decentralized platform like Lemmy attracts.
This comment will also receive some negative feedback but I don't care about diversity in my social media platform. I actually want people to enjoy the same things I do, like Linux, technology, geek jokes, etc.
That's the opposite of diversity I guess. More like a community where people have similar interests. That's what I like about it.
Eh, that is kinda the appeal of Reddit, and its alternatives. Finding smaller communities of likeminded individuals that you can group into a tailored feed.
I always say the magic of this model is that it's not just a firehose of every possible interest, it's more like a shower of dozens of tiny handpicked jets. It just happens that on Lemmy, the "All" feed is still reasonably tailored to the main demographic here. That being tech nerds who dislike Reddit's recent decisions enough to make a change.
That's exactly why I simply cannot not go back to reddit from time to time. Lemmy is nice and all but all communities that are not focused on tech stuff are complete ghost towns. Sure, one could say, that I should create the content and post it here. But I'm simply not that kind of person. I seldom come up with interesting stuff to share, but enjoy interacting with the posts of other people, writing a comment here and there. And I'd say many if not most others are similar.
Um, that isn't the definition of diversity being used here. They were suggesting some demographic diversity not interest diversity. Unless you are suggesting only young white males are into Linux, technology, geek jokes, etc. In which case, fuck off with that bigotry.
Haha it would be hard to know what everyone looks like behind the keyboards and I don't care whatsoever. One of the best things about tech culture is that you are judged by what you actually know and how well you can work with others. :)
Ah, so it was simple bigotry. Great, now kindly fuck off.
No, only a subset of young white males are into linux if you exclude trans women
And there is the bigotry I smelled.
Do fledgling communities typically START diversified? I would imagine it always starts this way. You invent the thing. You send it to your like minded friends, they send it to their like minded friends, etc. I feel like diversity inevitably requires time and numbers.
Yep, and in lemmy’s case, it was created by FOSS enthusiasts. And then it’s run on servers administrated by similar enthusiasts.
there's no way you could even guess the skin color of a person by reading their comment. i could be a 70-year old asian man for all you care.
maybe because "race" just isn't discussed as much because it's also basically a social construct besides minor evolutionary differences.
People of different background have more chance to have a bigger diversity of point of view. You may not be able to guess the background of a single commenter, but you can spot things missing. Also, I wasn't actually thinking about race, but gender identities and sexual orientations as well.
Well then you're nutso because. Blahaj and such have a huge smattering
A 'smattering' is a small amount of something. You've described a huge small amount.
A ginormous smidgen. A massive skosh. An anemic plenitude.
A large boulder the size of a small boulder.
Ah "skosh"...I'm not sure I've ever seen it in writing, but my first mentor at my first career job used it all the time. Every amount of distance under a foot (in a structural discipline) was a skosh of some sort.
Just a bit of a skosh, a slight skosh...a good healthy skosh...
Brought back a good memory there.
Fun fact, "skosh" comes from the occupation of Japan after WWII, from Japanese "sukoshi" 'a little bit'.
Race is a social construct that impacts so many people in a very real way. The race that you're sorted into affects so much of where you can go, what you can do, and how the government treats you.
Jesus dude what country do you live in? That sounds terrible
Yeah there is not nearly as much to be learned here which is the major appeal of reddit to me. I already know what the comments will say before I open a lemmy post
I agree completely.
I don't have examples at hand now, but I feel like I see so much like minorly-sexist talk. Or at least the stuff I only imagined horny men write, in so many threads.
Reddit was the same like ~10 years ago and I don't miss that part of it.
I don't feel like we're ever going to get past that until we can make the sign up process very nearly effortless. Reading about signing up for an account on the fediverse can be a lot of new info. Choosing an instance can feel like a lot when new to the fediverse and at the point that it becomes something difficult or confusing, a lot of people just lose interest.
It definitely lacks diversity. But at the same time it reminds me of the early internet where we had dedicated forums like IGN. Most people weren't on these forums nor cared to be there. The problem here is sometimes Lemmy is not welcoming because of the way it is designed. You have to host and run your own instance or join someone else's instance. That is good because we, the users of Lemmy, own it but bad because we become very protectionists. We want to protect our instance from bad actors but some users take it to the extreme and protect the instance from people who aren't like them and think differently.
I totally agree with you. Feels like 4chan.
Reddit has that AND the 16-45 days old repost spam bot base covered.
Youngin's.
Younger for me. They're either pro Palestine or really pro Palestine, which to me is the idealism of youth. I'd say mainly 16-30 first world or equivalent males.
So far from what I've seen in a year is that anyone who points out racism gets downvoted
It's worth stepping back a moment to appreciate that it's actually worked. Whether it will continue is another story, but Lemmy became a successful and viable alternative to Reddit. That's worthy of praise and celebration, and it couldn't be done without the admins and mods of .world who've made this place into what it is.
Lemmy is like 1/2 of what reddit was able to do for me. I haven't gone back to reddit since the exodus, I deleted all my posts and my account and never went back. But even now when I need information on anything from a community it's always reddit that pops up with the information that I need. I understand this is because of userbase and interacting with it but lemmy has not been able to do that effectively yet.
Granted I did post about a fish for my fishtank here and it was answered actually pretty quickly.
I think I'm just not understanding what instances and the feddiverse is. Most posts I'm interested in have like 1 or 2 comments, and half the time they're not useful interactions. It just feels kind of dead here. And again I understand it's because of the lack of interaction and userbase. But to say it's better than reddit or the best alternative is being a little frivolous.
It isn't about "winning". Lemmy can coexist with any Fediverse application, and that's the beauty of it. Everyone on the Fediverse wins.
Not every "Reddit alternative" is on the Fediverse.
Honestly in the current landscape, any alternative to an already popular platform that isn't federated in some way is doomed from the start.
True even for megacorps for Facebook; hence why Threads is federating.
To the people who want Lemmy to be more active, if you want that, you have to be part of it.
The internet adage is that on any forum 10% of users comment, and 1% post. Lemmy needs to break out of that paradigm, and users should be disproportionately active compared to user/activity on Reddit.
People like posting in places where other people are already posting. It’s a snowball effect. That’s why meme communities have managed to take off; the 1% of users can pump out a huge amount of memes in a short time and make the place feel more lively than it actually is, which in turn kickstarts it and makes it lively for memes.
I make posts mostly in non-meme communities because I think Lemmy should have that too. Some posts are just links but a lot of them are original content. I think it adds value but I simply cannot, as one person, post the kind of volume that memeposters can. These more niche communities need people to post.
If you are subscribed to an interest community, I strongly encourage posting new threads there.
TLDR:
Oh the irony in this comment... The only person being gaslit is yourself.
And secondly - a lot of people don't know that you can now block instances individually and that defederation/blocking is not really that big of a deal anymore.
Reading the comments in that thread made me realise how little I miss Reddit. The sub is RedditAlternatives and there's a whole lot of people in there whinging that people are talking about alternatives to Reddit. Lemmy has it's problems, but Reddit is toxic AF.
I guess you could say the people who actually moved away from Reddit aren't on /r/RedditAlteratives anymore
if you think fediverse is worse than reddit you have issue
There's a certain demographic of people who crave a constant flow of outrage to fuel their social media addiction. I know because I've struggled with this myself.
Reddit has a slew of bots and artificially promoted posts to provide this to increase engagement.
I guess we have bots here too, but it's trivial to block them, and obvious spam/ads tend to be removed on sight.
There's far less outrage fuel here than on reddit, and also the comparatively slower flow of content encourages actual engagement and participation vs. merely consuming.
I can see why someone who's balls deep in reddit might be disappointed here.
I may also be completely wrong about some of this, but that's my observational take.
As someone who went from a daily user of reddit for a decade and now hasn't used reddit basically since the app's red wedding, I really don't think this is it. As much as I hope the fediverse and Lemmy take off, currently I'm extremely pessimistic about that because if anything the problem is the reverse of what you describe. My current front page on Lemmy (all/active):
and so on. And to get to this great non-rage bait content, I had to go through the trouble of even figuring out how to use the fediverse and which instance to sign up for (and then still hop instances a few times) and spend my first week just blocking like I was getting paid for it because language settings on this site mean nothing, more or less, and there are a few "communities" that pop up here that provide all of the intellectual stimulation of jamming a q-tip too far in your ear.
And if those posts alone don't paint a clear picture about who the user base is here, heading to the comments will. Most of the comments read like they're posted by "lefty white linux bro" or "communist trans linux they/them" who have decided that those are their entire identity/personality. While none of those things are bad and I tick a lot of those boxes myself, it creates a real echo chamber that borders on hostile to anyone that isn't in that category. The other side effect I've seen on this is that this place can offer up some real doozies of takes in a way that is likely to make anyone who actually knows anything just up and leave. I saw one the other day that was talking about greatest people in the FOSS space and uncritically lists RMS that was heavily upvoted. At least someone brought up why that's problematic in the comments, but imagine hopping over to the mainstream sites and talking about best musicians and seeing R Kelly on the list...
Anyway, while I don't mind an echo chamber now and then, if Lemmy in particular is to grow and be useful for anyone outside of this base, I'd suggest the community adopt something closer akin to "reddiquette" which is probably the main reason why reddit was able to get somewhat past this in the early days, and some of the "niche" communities were able to grow. I put niche in quotes here, because as it stands now Lemmy doesn't have even very vibrant communities for fairly mainstream things (music and TV, movies, etc.)
So while I personally choose to spend my time here instead of on reddit, that's mostly an ideological choice and I view as a sacrifice because I'm missing out on tons of other content that I enjoy. Even your post is a form of this – "reddit bad" (sure) "because of bots" (also sure) "and Lemmy has less outrage content and fuels engagement" (uh, no.) Lemmy has as much or more, and it's only fueling engagement on those that don't immediately bounce off, but since you posted "their team bad, our team good" you're getting upvotes and probably will continue to.
That you accuse leftists and marginalized groups of "mAkInG iT ThEiR wHoLe IdEnTiTy" tells me everything I need to know about your privilege and worldview, and explains immediately why you'd prefer reddit, a notorious alt-right platform.
We're generally not welcome on reddit, so the fact that bigots and transphobes or right-wingers get immediately dunked on here is actually a good feature, and makes this far less toxic overall.
FYI I've blocked you, so I won't see any further hot takes from you and therefore won't respond. My time and sanity are far too valuable to waste on someone like you.
Ah perfect. Sets up a strawman, completely misses the point of my post, says one of the dumbest things I've ever heard (reddit being an alt-right website*) and then immediately moves to block in response to me saying this place is a hostile echo chamber. 10/10, no notes, illustrates the point I was trying to make better than I did.
Just to be clear for other readers, I was not saying that any of those things are bad I was saying that this place has a purity test that borders on stupidity which this post illustrates well.
* just how does one come to this conclusion? It's less lefty than Lemmy, but not by much. It's alt-right communities are usually either banned, quarantined, and regardless of the technicals of the website or how the admins run it, they've always been outcast and if you say "vote for trump" in any but the clearly right echo chambers, you're going to get downvoted to hell.
It's fine for actual bigots to get dunked on. But Lemmy users will dunk on you: literally for liking the "wrong" piece of software. The echo chamber is real.
I've not noticed. Can you provide an example? You mean Chrome?
Honestly, I wish more people would switch to Firefox, but I'd never dunk on someone for Chrome. I might try to talk them out of it though lol
You perfectly illustrated the point
The "point"
"But I like my corporate cage 😭😭😭"
I don't know what current Reddit looks like but old reddit is still irreplaceable so far.
People on Reddit are simply too addicted to the content. That's the only real reason I can see what could bind someone to the platform. It all boils down to that - content. (And you probably don't need me to repeat the usual "for more content we need more users" lol)
The old reddit is purely a technical thing at this point. I believe in the popular opinion that it's a matter of time before it gets shut down.
I've personally been a user of it on Apollo and Relay and to me it was the way to use it. Rarely have I interacted with the website. So I imagine it's a similar thing with the old mode users.
I'll reshare my thoughts on this from a comment I left in a completely different context a few days ago:
Yeah, I'm so weary of this argument but you're dead right.
If I and all my neighbours close our curtains then we won't see all the garbage, rats, dead bodies, and other refuse piling up in our street, and then congratulate ourselves at the lovely community we share.
It's absurd. As though everyone expects that corporate encroachment into the fediverse is going to come with a big sign that says "threads" or some such.
This is basically all the same issue: not enough users. It's so dumb. "Lemmy isn't as good as Reddit because everyone isn't there yet. But ya, Reddit sucks." /face-palm Then come over and get users to come over instead of saying there's not enough people.
Hey, it's not all politics! Star Trek is doing great here! I just saw a post about how the Bell Riots are going to...wait...
https://bellriots.netlify.app/
Lemmy right now actually feels like it's the same size as when I started using Reddit, before the Digg migration. It was so much better then.
well it doesnt necessarily need to be politics, the biggest subgroup for lemmy users are usually people into tech (a lot of tech and tech adjacent communities are fairly sized on lemmy) as they are the ones more likely to make the jump. Easiest way to tell is to go to the communities page, sort by all communities and count the number, or even just get an eyeballs search to know that a common thread between many communities is either memes or tech
Not only not enough users, but there are certain users on here that are generating constant spam and/or propaganda. That becomes half the feed if you don't block them.
Fair enough. But thats also understandable since there’s no single entity moderating. I think we should accept to get wet when showering.
I‘m pretty sure we can use blocklists for instances that suck like mastodon. Its very easy although masto doesnt do a good job yet to promote blocklists.
Which means that when more people come in here, there will be more spam and more propaganda, reaching the feed more often. And you won't really stop people like that, they'll simply go to a different instance and do the exact same thing.
Well, the same as always. They evolve, we evolve. Its an arms race.
Its already way past that as well. Bans of the largest instances federate through to smaller instances. So if you manage to get banned on instances I federate with, I don’t see your stuff either.
Works pretty well already.
That's Reddit, too. World News there is basically all Israeli propaganda right now. It becomes a lot more diluted with more users.
Some of the people in that reddit thread are unreasonably angry that some people moved to Lemmy.
I'll never understand loving a company so much that anyone who doesn't like it is automatically deemed a bad person. Why is a stranger's choice of social media so personal to some of these people? Why are they so livid?
I'm not even going to quote the specific comments I'm referring to just in case I get banned. One of them was comparing the entire lemmyverse to the subreddits that were banned over explicitly only having content about hating strangers for existing.
I'm happy I left if that what I'm "missing out" on.
I love it because the apps are much better.. The regular reddit app has too many notifications, and red reader is too boring, and laggy. I'm using liftoff and it is so much better
Same. If they kept RIF I never would have known how crappy Reddit is and I left and never looked back.
Yeah, when RiF stopped working I just stopped using Reddit. I didn't want their app with their random irrelevant notifications, nft shit and all the rest.
Can't believe how many people went through the same steps. I miss reddit, but post RIF, it was unusable
I use it on occasion on mobile. Oh boy is the UX bad. UI is too cluttered as well but manageable.
The mobile UI before the exodus was fine imo.
I use the full width/height card UI in Sync. The old style isnt my thing and I use(d) lemmy/reddit during lunch break.
Same. I was a dedicated user of Boost for Reddit (before the API Armageddon) and the only reason why I'm using Lemmy now is because they made an app for Lemmy (which I'm currently using).
Boost is such an amazing app and made Reddit tolerable
But Liftoff doesn't seem to be getting updates.
When this happened I went back to Eternity, a fork of Infinity, the app I used for reddit. That's also the beauty of Lemmy, there are lots of third party apps unlike reddit that banned every single one
Everyone in that thread has Stockholm syndrome. They're so used to being force fed shit that they couldn't possibly believe that an online platform could be run any differently than Reddit.
And, everyones total misunderstanding of the fediverse. Yea, no wonder it's all tech people here, dumbass
When I was recruiting people during r/place and the protests, I found most of the issue being proper user guides to get people to sign up. Lemmy may be pretty confusing, especially to non-techies.
I still don't really get what people find so difficult about picking an instance. Most people seem to manage getting an email account, which requires picking an email provider like Gmail, Outlook, etc. Joining Lemmy isn't that much different.
I'd hazard a guess and suggest the word "instance" confuses most and puts them off.
Could continue with the email analogy and call it “provider”?
I suspect that would help
A Lemmy provider. Haha, guess that works
It is like picking an email provider, but it's like picking an email provider in the early days when there were no big players. People are more comfortable picking a provider that has a big name backing it. You even just mentioned providers from Google and Microsoft. No such options exist for Lemmy so people see all the instances and get overwhelmed. Personally it doesn't bother me because I don't care that much about my account history, but if you're a content creator you don't want to lose your account so it can be a deterrence, and other people may worry more about picking the wrong instance. I think it's also not very straightforward what the implications of picking an instance is and a lot of instances don't do a good job explaining their policies.
I think the issue is mentioning lemmy being federated and having instances in the first place, even as a tech user a senior software developer I had to learn about how it works does stuff sync up etc.
Now imagine a non techie user.
And that doesn't even mention stuff like instances being defederared from each other.
I remember trying Mastodon first, and my first reaction was, "What the fuck? I have to choose a specific sub/server?", and as I read through the list of each server that said things like "This is a community for camping enthusiasts", I found myself extremely off put, as I don't believe (at the time anyway) that anything said the server didn't matter and I would still have full access to the other boards. It sounded as though I would have to pick explicitly between a camping-centric community, a tech-centric community, a car-centric community, etc.
Lemmy was a little easier to grasp, though I did gravitate straight to Lemmy.ca because that sounded like the most practical option given what I wanted to access and where I live. But the setup process was definitely a learning curve. Eventually I wound up really liking it, but it didn't truly fall into place until Sync dropped. Now my experience is nearly indistinguishable from my past ten years on reddit, minus the constant angst, hostility, and doom scrolling.
I tried to get my tech-savvy brother on here to no avail. He showed up when a bunch of servers were being defederated and I guess he thought it was setting a bad precedent right off the bat. I'm assuming he was unknowingly on one of the bad servers and was being exposed to their bitching and complaining without realizing what was really going on with them.
We need a service called LemmyIn that does everything for you and places you in every available instance it can find, save for anything inherently bad or controversial.
It's because, like with email, the average person doesn't give a fuck what provider they choose. They want to use "Lemmy", they don't care if it's lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, etc.
It matters even less than with email, if they're using a third-party app like Sync, because it's not like they'll ever look at the instance their name is hosted on.
Because people don't explain it with good analogies like that. That's the first I heard it put that way, and I found it helpful.
One thing I had an issue with when I migrated was actually understanding the differences between instances. A few aren't obvious as to their purpose. If you randomly pick the wrong one to look at first, you may get a negative impression of the fediverse because of it.
What was your negative experience?
I would say my hardest thing onboarding was actually understanding what each instance was really about. Your pretty much presented with endless choices seemingly and you can't really weigh every option.
Yeah that’s what you said in the comment I replied to. Was wondering what that negative experience you had was. Other then them defederating, shutting down, or having overall crappy uptime there’s not a whole lot of differences when using Lemmy.
For newcomers it's not clear what the significance of choosing an instance is, so that makes it hard to choose, and those potential downsides of choosing the wrong instance are actually pretty significant, or at least pretty annoying.
Yes I understand this. I’m just trying to open up the conversation on what those negatives are for people to see.
I see. There aren't other major negatives that come to mind, but those ones are very important.
Oh I see what you were getting at. The second half of my message talking about getting a negative impression was more so speculation on how someone might react to joining one of the more politically charged instances like lemmygrad or hexbear. Which could give a new user the impression that the fediverse was all like that.
I think they made it easier by having a suggested instances category at the top. And even back then, you could see the description of every instance listed. I think the main issue is having to submit the application, even though I know it doesn't have to be long and that it's necessary in this situation.
Getting banned from ML for saying that Russia is commiting war crimes in Ukraine. And then again for saying that the US revolution didn't generally involve mass rape. And then again for calling an obvious troll out.
This last time, the ban reason was literally "Socsa." Which I guess is flattering, but being put on a short leash for not breaking any rules, while tankies are free to troll threads with pig shit gifs is not a positive experience.
The stuff you’re talking about is why a lot of people are turned off period. Which people have already made that point in this thread.
You’ll get banned on ML for much of anything. I’m banned in the memes community of all places. This is not dependent on the instance you decided to use.
There needs to be groups of communities you can block or subscribe to. I couldn't give two shits about Linux or sports teams or gross anime porno. Seeing all that will put off most casual visitors. After 6 months of blocking communities I have a fairly decent front page but still block weird anime shit daily. 99.999% of people will just flounce.
This is where the real problem is. Lemmy users act like there's no issue, because you can block anyone you like, but to most users exploring the platform, that's not helpful at all.
People generally don't want to have to spend an hour making the feed into something useable, much less 6 months. What will draw people in is a feed that is already interesting and useful, which they can customize as they go.
I think the solution would be a set of default subscriptions, and even a default block list. Something that instance admins can curate themselves for the new user experience, but users can still customize as they see fit as they get to know the platform and communities
Absolutely. Even just blocking languages you can't speak would help.
I'm still confused by the need for blocking communities. Maybe it's because I use Sync, but I only subscribe to communities I'm interested in, and I use trending/new community pages to find new ones to subscribe to. My front page is my subscribed communities, so I am never subjected to all the other content I don't care about
I browse everything and block things I don't like. That way I get an endless scroll, like reddit, and don't have 5 posts from my subscribed list. That let's me see everything and I can subscribe to things I might otherwise never see. Just a different approach. There is a metric fuck-ton of dreck though.
This is a symptom of the problem, I think. The idea of a social media platform being confusing enough to even need a new user guide will be enough to put people off.
I think the conversation needs to be framed differently. Most new users aren't going to care about federation or decentralization when they first look at the platform. Don't tell people to choose an instance, just recommend one that you think is good. At that point, the only thing that will draw people in is to see interesting conversations and communities when they visit.
To me, that means feeds that aren't dominated by niche interests by default. Don't get me wrong, I love Star Trek and I appreciate Linux for what it's good at. But if I wasn't into those things, I would think those are the only communities being represented here.
In that respect, the sorting algorithm needs work. The votes are a good way to start, but it's become pretty clear that in the new user feed, some communities need to be weighted differently than others. The initial experience should probably show more actual conversations, and fewer communities that live off bot posts.
People were really excited about being able to make bots that repost entire rss feeds or repost other site content into everyone's Lemmy front page, and those are fun projects to work on. But those need to have a lot smaller impact on the default feed that instances show
Yeah, lets wait til the bugs in 0.19.1 are ironed out too please 😌 (well, the big federation bug at least).
With over a million users, I personally don't feel an overwhelming urge to make more people come here, I prefer a more organic growth, but that's maybe only me.
Like I do want everyone to be able to use the internet, but I do want a space that requires some minimum level of technical competency. It's a very easy filter to find people more like myself.
I feel all you guys, but, if it ever reaches the stage where it's mainstream, we could all move to a more techie instance amongst ourselves.
I mean the sentiment in the comments in that thread is not at all positive. The damage the tankies/hexbear/lemmygrad has done to the reputation of lemmy is not negligible.
imho It's important to help people stear away from those places when they join lemmy except if that is their intention.
Lemmy went stronger when center-left people joined the platform. .ml and Lemmygrad will remain far-left. There are many server available to suit their needs. I was once on .ml until I joined the server set by people who were active on r/piracy before.
I hear you and totally agree.
I came over from the reddit migration and subscribed to as many similar communities as I could. A lot of them faded away in a month so I tried to post frequently because thats what this is about.
But some lemmy communities ganged up on us with mass downvotes and it stopped being fun.
I really, really want this place to take off and be amazing like I imagine it could; supporting so many amazing ideas, hobbies and cultures. But I find myself on the defensive a lot.
This is going to sound blasphemous, but I'm brainstorming tools to fix some of lemmys problems, only to stand back and realize what I envisioned is a reddit mod! Nooooo!
Anyways, I'm sure as spam happens, new tools will develop. I have high hopes.
Just wish communities were nicer. There's some hate here I know the majority wants to be better than. I'll lead by example and hope others do too. :)
What about the spam and propaganda generated by users on lemmy.world? We have so much of it here lemmy becomes either empty or unusable depending on if you block them.
What kind of spam? I don’t see much of any of it.
In the same vein that Hexbear users don't see their own posts as spam or propaganda. They fit your narrative more so you don't notice it.
This would be ”making you look at the shit Israel has been doing", right?
The straight from highly biased often misinformation websites, yes it's propaganda. The fact that lemmy is being flooded in it by a few select individuals makes it propaganda. The straight up lies being told around here makes it propaganda.
or "people don't believe that communism would work"
The Hamas defence here is inexcusable and I'm not surprised many people are turned off by this.
Generally I don't like how lemmy.world is being hijacked by fringe politics. This has ended all other reddit alternatives (like Voat). We have a good thing here - let's not let bad actors to hijack it.
Condemnation of Israel's response is not "fringe politics" (nor indeed "Hamas defence") and if you believe it to be so then whatever media bubble you've been placed in is working, other than this place. I'd be glad of that of I were you. America makes up a loud and influential portion of political opinion but it is 4% of the world and even there not a universal truth.
If you consider anyone with a different politics to you to be "fringe" or a "bad actor" then it is you who are not useful, not them.
Thats not what I said.
Why are you twisting my words with this strawman? There are literally comments defending Hamas.
If anyone did any twisting of words you did by making the connection that criticism of Israel is defense of Hamas. You can be anti-hamas and anti-Israel and you can even be pro-Palestine and anti-hamas.
I haven't seen a lot of people defend Hamas (and the ones I've seen are quickly beaten down). However I have seen a lot of people argue anti-Israel takes are pro-hamas, which just isn't right.
Ok, so your response to me was irrelevant twisting words? Because I didn't mention Hamas, you did. I'm not the one trying to change the topic of conversation.
I always have to laugh when I see an ostensibly pro-lemmy comment that says:
Do these people understand that basically the whole idea behind a Federated system is that community owners have significantly more moderation power than they do on commercial platforms? If someone's main problem with Reddit was unchecked mod power, I have some bad news for them...
OMG reading through that comment chain - no not this one, the one on old-reddit.com - makes me remember what Reddit (outside of the tiny niche subs) is like, . Leadership flows down-hill, and it is not just spez over there, it is his entire empire of hate, small-mindedness, and bigotry. Who on earth would see what Elon did to Twitter and think, "me 2!" (then overthrow the mods who loved the communities that they themselves built, replacing them with scabs who ban the humans and upvote the bots)?
Edit: for those who cannot bring themselves to go THERE, I brought it here for your amusement - you're welcome:-P.
A bit of a self aware wolves moment as Scott Adams frequently says ridiculous, smug, inflammatory and poorly researched things on the internet.
Maybe it's a how-to manual in order to get better at it? :-P
Damn, rare insightful Dilbert.
Yeah, reading the comments on the linked thread made me curious as to how the other subs I used to visit were doing, and it was so…angry, like everywhere.
Honestly…has Reddit’s vibes always been so negative? Maybe I’m recognizing it for what it is now that I’m not as entrenched in it, but damn I left that site feeling irritated as hell. Lemmy isn’t perfect, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t feel as angry scrolling through here.
(The Gundam sub seems to be doing ok tho, godspeed to them)
They weren't always as bad as they are now - Huffman has done a lot to make them more so, especially after the protests. e.g. there were hateful trolls who got banned by a moderator who cared about their community, and Huffman removed the former mods (b/c of protesting) and put those trolls in their place. You can imagine what came next.
Is this some sort of self-aware joke about the lemmy community?
Leaving reddit was a good idea, joining Lemmy, I'm not so sure anymore.
The userbase here is not really diverse in itself, so the whole platform gets this large echo chamber vibe. And with "not diverse" I don't mean hostile or anything, just very homogeneous. Overwhelmingly left and far left on the political spectrum, embracing all things LGBT+, high nerd & tech factor; and if you don't belong to or identify with either of those factions, you get downvoted to oblivion, and worse yet, mod removed and banned for no factual reason.
What made reddit strong as a platform was that you had the right kind of diversity and a big enough userbase to not spiral out of control, unless the top management fucked up.
On Lemmy, instance admins are (or become) often the worst offenders, making any interactions with users on their instance tiresome, unless you regurgitate the same stuff that has been said there over and over and over again.
Jesus. Look at those comments. Reddit has gotten considerably worse since the exodus.
While Lemmy is gradually growing and the whole federation is a pretty good concept too I have one question about lemmy and it's future.
Since it's just two devs maintaining the whole project (I know there are many open source contributors but the project is on them right?) what if they get tired of the project or go MIA? Can a fork be made and that can be maintained as a replacement of lemmy?
How are and will be the SEO of the lemmy's instances? Reddit reached a wide audience due to that. It's nice to have a niche set of audience at the start but that should not be the case forever right?
Reddit sucked in 2008 and it sucks now. It only has value because people were too lazy to implement a proper openid system in any of the forum software packages over the years. There's no reason any community needs to be hosted on reddit. Forums SEO just like reddit when searching for answers except everyone has divested from the internet and given control to a handful of ruthless corporations who just want to hoover up all the data so they can train their live chat AI bots.
If you want lemmy to be better you have to contribute even if it means not being showered in validation and praise. The echo chamber era is over.
there were other options?
Hello from /Kbin
I love kbin but being a one man show and lacking API it was never really going to be the replacement. I am, however, glad to have it as one of a handful of smaller alternatives and a sort of cousin to Lemmy.
If it doesn't have an API, how do I still see posts from it in my feed? Do you mean it integrates with the fediverse, but only has a web interface for now (ie. no apps)?
Yeah, the latter. There is an API, but I think it was only released in the last month or so. I'm not sure to what extent it's complete.
A kbin instance can be downloaded as a PWA, and it works decent.
As for third party apps there's Lunar, iOS only. Haven't tried it.
There was also Artemis. It had the best UI/UX design I've ever seen. Unfortunately the dev appears to have vanished.
Before the API, I think they were web scraping.
That's definitely not true, they had an API back in September when I looked into adding support for it
They didn't have an sdk, but the API most certainly has been around for a while
You're correct. I misunderstood. The API has indeed been around for a while.
The main instance (kbin.social) only started using it around a month ago: https://kbin.social/m/kbinDevlog/t/642285/kbin-RTR-19-Summary-of-current-work-and-plans-for-the
Apologies for the confusion.
Ah... That I didn't know, I read through the documentation to see how hard it would be, but I never tried to use it
If that's true, I see your point... That's not nearly as bad as not having an API, but it's still a deal breaker
The API is new but took time and effort, it just wasn't available at the time.
It has an API, has for a while now
It didn't at the time I'm speaking of.
Kbin is just lemmy+mastadon iirc
Takkun?
When I was leaving Reddit I heard of Kbin (which I do have an account in and still check all the time), raddle.me, Tildes, squabbles, and I think another. So many!
During the exodus I remember I wanted to try Tildes, but it was closed off from new users. (I don't even understand why it was recommended.)
There is Kbin:-)
One that I don't hear about is raddle.me, a centralized alternative.
They fail on their promise of curbing the mods problem with a transparent modlog and active admins. It's the same bunch of authoritarian kids as reddit and the power dynamics are unchanged, they make friends with each other and with the administrators and it's exactly as hard to get one removed as it ever was on major lemmy instances
I prefer the federation where if a mod/admin's bad you can just create a community with the same name on a different instance
Some folks moved to matrix and discord. For a while it seemed like Squabbles might also be a thing.
Several, that were flooded with users after hate subre**its were closed. They usually turned into cesspools of hate themselves.
calls Lemmy and Reddit a forumAs a forum user, please don't...
Forums are so much better than whatever Lemmy and Reddit are, the problem is none exist in the same "everything in the same place and people can create subsections" form.
Why don't we have federated forums then? The technology should be more or less similar.
lemmyBB exists which lets you view Lemmy as a forum. Seems like all the hosted versions of it are down though, and nutomic is too busy working on the backend to maintain it.
It doesn't solve the bumping issue though, if the majority of users use "Reddit style" Lemmy then threads become inactive when they're not in people's feed anymore, it's a major point of BBs, discussions are brought back to the front so people continue participating in them long term.
Bumping works just fine with the "New Comments" sort of Lemmy, which lemmybb uses.
That's the man himself! Hi :)
Yes, but if barely anyone sorts this way then the discussions just die much more quickly than they would on a BB
I wish we did, I think they went out of favour because most people prefer the "speed" of platforms like Reddit, where threads are active for a couple of hours and then something new comes up and a new conversation starts.
The problem is, there's no accumulation of knowledge, it's the same arguments and information getting repeated every time a new post is started on a similar subject.
You can't tell someone "Discussion is already happening on this subject in this thread, so we're deleting your post" when discussions don't get bumped to the top and discussions don't stay active once they're not on people's front page anymore.
The threaded replies don't help either, it's impossible to keep up with a post that gets a lot of attention since you can have hundreds if not thousands of branches spreading in all directions...
There's a good reason why specialized discussion platforms all use forums instead a Reddit style system, they want to build a knowledge database and they do, plenty of active threads that are over a decade old on many forums all over the internet!
Yeah I've been waiting for something like that.
Discourse added federation
Because as we learned in our lemmy growing pains, large-scale federation is a challenge that requires a fairly concerted effort and then doesn't always succeed very well.
People still (rightly) have tons of complaints about lemmy failing to do things as well as reddit did. It has some huge upsides (no center ownership) but it's a challenge. Now imagine the much-smaller userbase. I knew everyone in the topics I frequented back in my forum days because there were that few people.
Oh come on, it's a forum with voting. Sort comments by old and posts by new and you have forum mode
And discussions that are dead after 24h max.
I take part in discussions that have been going on every day for 10 years + on forums.
And then there are forums like The Goonswarm Forums, where they get pissed when you accidentally "necro" a thread.
But there's a difference between reviving an old thread from months or years ago and keeping a thread alive over years by having people participating every day for that long...
Here's a good example:
https://www.advrider.com/f/threads/yamaha-wr250r-threadfest.936588/
Since 2013, 21 000 pages with 20 replies per page!
That was very rare back when I used forums. But similarly, at least every month I'd have a reply to a 1-2-year-old comment I left in reddit. It happens.
It happens but you'll be the only one to know.
Are you sure you're not a little nostalgic about your old forum years?
They're still used by people that are actual experts at what they do. There's a reason why GBATemp, XDAforums, all kinds of car and games forums are still being used and are still very active.
People conflate the two terms because, if I told someone for the last 16 years that Reddit was an aggregator, they looked at me with a blank expression. It's not a word that is in the common parlance.
It's also not easily recognizable as an aggregator when you go to subs/communities where there are zero or nearly zero links, and it's all threads.
They're honestly more like a hybrid between an aggregator and an oversimplified forum. Most subs I frequented feel like Delphi did back when I grew up.
Bro I know that exact blank stare. I always catch it when I try to explain what Reddit is.
I have been thinking of starting my own Arabic instance since Lemmy has Arabic support. I am just not prepared for such a project.
I send Lemmy some money every month. Not a lot but what I can. I'm also learning Rust and once I get confident I'll contribute. I like Lemmy and the fediverse in general.
If the fediverse sucks so much, why are Meta and WordPress and Mozilla making efforts to join it, hm?
lemmy rules. i wish there were less memes and porn on the front page, and/or that the front page refreshed quicker and with more variety. but in recent months it's been bug free for me. and what's huge is that i actually feel good posting here. i'm not giving my effort to a shitty shitty corporate hellhole, it's doing some small part to expand the fediverse.
If your instance is running 0.19+, switch to Scaled as your default sort. It amplifies the smaller communities so you'll see more variety in content. It's so much better :)
I've never seen porn on here because my instance doesn't federate with any instance that host that kind of stuff, but I think you could block the communities where it is posted or switch instances.
You can also just block NSFW. Done.
But that unfortunately also blocks stuff that isn't porn.
Yeah we should have some categorizations
Replacing "Lemmy" with "Fedderverse" would behoove you, OP. Sincerely, A Kbin user.
Ernest has fixed a whole lot of the issues today, but I wouldn't recommend kbin at the exact moment, lol. Not that these issues have made me feel like going anywhere else.
It's been pretty solid aside from the last few days and the last few days straddled a major, worldwide holiday. I think we should be able to give Ernest a break over it. Yes, we're small. But he got on fixing it just as soon as the problem was identified and New Years had passed.
What do you recommend then?
Who runs Lemmy?
Who runs the instance you would recommend?
In Ernest I trust. Kbin is a groovy way to consume the federverse. Just like Lemmy et al.
But a little more the instance that Ernest runs...
I don't recommend anything. I just personally wouldn't invite anyone to kbin right now because they'd likely be frustrated. Next week it'll likely be fine.
The Reddit post specifically mentions Kbin and why the OP prefers Lemmy. Mentioning Lemmy specifically and not the Fediverse/Threadiverse is the point
but I heard kbin users eat shoes!
For me Lemmy provides a value proposition that reddit does not: consent.
I am surprised reddit hasn't removed this post yet.
I got an account banned for saying "lemmy dot world" when someone asked "Are there even any good alternatives?"
Lemmy I think is in a good place since it's still fairly new. It took a while before Reddit had critical mass and I'd say that happened when Reddit started "solving" crimes and then making the news because of it. The "We did it Reddit!". I think that's when people really started to show up. On here, there's not a constant flood, which can be a good thing. When you reply, you're not buried by thousands of other posts. On Reddit it felt like, if you didn't get in early, chances are no one really saw what you posted. Honestly, I've had better engagement here than I did on Reddit, both in views and quality of replies.
Only time I end up on Reddit, is when I'm searching something and a post from 2-3 years ago pops up. But I haven't logged into Reddit or actually engaged with anything new since the exodus. The date of this account was the last day I officially used Reddit.
I do my best to tell about Lemmy and explain what the Fediverse is with my surroundings. Lots of people don't even know about the existence of Lemmy/Kbin or the Fediverse yet. I try not to be pushy like a Arch Linux user but overall I'm doing my part !
I’m concerned with the amount of bugs cropping up between major updates. I looked at the repo and they have no unit tests. Eventually people will get fed up with the amount of bugs appearing.
I use a third party app and see very little. Over time it’ll get better also.
Lemmy still feels like beta (while Kbin is alpha), but it still is better than Reddit!
(no /s - I really believe that, b/c the people here vs. there make ALL the difference)
To all those who contribute code, thank you for making this micro-world a better place for us all!:-)
Which repo are you talking about? There are tests in the main rust repo. Rust puts its tests in line with the code. https://github.com/search?q=repo%3ALemmyNet%2Flemmy%20%22%23%5Bcfg(test)%5D%22&type=code
I have no idea how complete these or or anything. But it's not 0
"Some tests in the backend" would instantly get you fired from some companies. Lack of tests is a symptom of the programmers not being as experienced as they should be, when making a platform such as this.
The issue is, if open source has any chance of competing with paid software, it needs the same standards a regular company has. It's not about "increasing productivity" as you put it. It's actually about doing less. By writing tests, you spend less time on the code that ends up in the final application. But the result of that, is that the final application breaks less. Issues that could have been avoided, are incredibly rare.
Writing regular code is fun, it's exciting. You deliver new toys that people see and are thankful for. Writing tests is the opposite of that, it's boring and dreary for most people. But it is necessary to maintain a quality product. No regular user will thank you for tests being present, they'll complain when things break. They won't adopt a new version, since there is no automatic regression testing possible, since you haven't written tests and things break in the next version. So now you have to test the entire thing yourself. Which is even more boring than writing tests, so you move onto exciting new features again. And you end up in a death spiral a few years from now, since you can't see why a certain feature stopped working, all the features depending on it break one after the other, and the only way to check what's wrong, is to go test everything there is.
Lol wut
Using an app, I’ve only had some very minor issues. Essentially, just occasional crashes.
Lemmy its not just CCP propaganda anymore (sorry wumao)
Soon as I set Lemmy to open to All, 99% of my downtime scrolling switched to here. I only check Reddit for the Nuzlocke subreddit honestly lol
It was not fully down and this completely ignores the issues that Lemmy had when they updated to the next version a while back. Really unnecessary bashing.
Totally not suspicious, but at the minimum a bit ignorant on how open source software development typically goes. And it isn't just Lemmygrad, but even their allegedly more moderate main instance Lemmy.ml, which is really just more of the same as far as users and moderation issues go. More problematic is the fact though that you're still supporting the devs and their problematic views simply by supporting their software and its development by directly using it, and this won't change until a proper fork from actually decent people is going to become the main used Lemmy software.
And overall, no one won this, because the whole protest was a failure as way too many people just remained on Reddit.
The Fediverse feels a lot like the old Reddit from 10+ years ago , but I suspect that once it becomes mainstream the shills and bots will move in and ruin it like they ruined Reddit.
Yes, but still far from being a competitor
Politics? What politics?
It's a shame that after all this time, Lemmy's web UI still sucks. It feels like nothing user-facing has changed since the Reddit exodus first started. Thankfully, third party apps can fill that gap, but most users' first interaction with Lemmy will be the web UI. Does anyone know why the UI portion moves so slow? Do the maintainers not want contributions, or is it that nobody wants to contribute?
Found Spez's alt account
Edit: # Fuck Spez
Yeah idk fuck the haters there I'm already satisfied and I'm sure it'll only get better over time
Definitely feeling great here, I moved out of Reddit right when the API sheitshow started and never look back!
Also, I'm donating to my instance's admin and to the open source dev of lemmy, so I feel compelled to use it even more because I pay for a great service :D
Seeing the growth...so work has gone into this!
Yeah, well it's only a matter of time before the mods and administrators turn this into a sterile, uninteresting, unfunny, sad hellscape of small people banning users who don't agree with every facet of their personal self-delusion.
I understand this comm is about Reddit... But you guys really need to just let it go already. You put so much effort into "owning" Reddit it's actually kinda sad.
Don't spend seven months talking about your ex.
This is par for the course though. We shit on Digg for years after everyone had migrated over!
True, fair point