Reddit keeps pushing on being a closed platform, now rolling out mandatory logging for old.reddit.com - worth pushing for the fediverse again?
Going by comments in the post, the required login is coming in waves, so not all people may notice immediately.
Still, as Reddit is strong-arming its way across, maybe worth signaling to people there that the fediverse may be used without an account, so long as there's even one instance that implements logged-out view as the protocol allows it?
I don't have access to my account any longer, possibly VPN ban, though I never tried to recover it so I can only guess why mine is lost, else I'd post myself.
https://lemmy.world/post/49993072Open linkView original on thebrainbin.org
290 replies
I’m on Lemmy for the first time today after discovering it because Reddit was doing this to me today. Good Riddance. Happy I found an alternative.
Welcome :)
Hi! We joined on the same day for the same reason :D
Edit: Nevermind, the little number next to my account name says I’m wrong. Apparently I have trouble reading a calendar.
I joined Lemmy like a lot of others, when Reddit shut down the API. I soon went back to Reddit but also stayed on Lemmy.
The big problem for me with Lemmy is it’s still way too small to use it the way I use Reddit. I’ve subscribed to a whole bunch of communities equivalent to the subreddits I read and comment on. On Reddit those subreddits have a few hundred people active on a daily basis, whereas on Lemmy they’re lucky to see 1 post and 2 comments a week.
Small communities and real discussions were always what I liked about Reddit, never the big subreddits with millions of users. For now, anyway, Lemmy’s communities are just too small to foster those discussions (on the topics I’m still on Reddit for, anyway; there’s plenty of politics here obviously).
While I agree there isn't a ton of discussion in a lot of communities here, I have had pretty good success just posting the questions myself in communities where relevant even if the community currently has almost no activity. Sure you don't get 100s of responses but I do feel the response quality is higher here and ultimately that's the only way to help lemmy grow to be more active in those communities
I’m not really a question poster though, I’m a question answerer. I think most people are like me, which is why tiny communities (but non-zero) don’t have any discussions: there aren’t enough question posters, just a lot of question answerers waiting around like kids at the school dance.
Maybe a good middle ground would be to make posts answering questions others might have but that weren't asked yet?
Me too! I never went back to Reddit though. I lost my account with rif that was carefully built over years. I still can't figure out lemmy, fediverse, whatever it's called. The tech is not something I care about. I want a simple and easy to use interface, like rif. But this is 1000 times better than dodging ads, bots and trolls on an over-capitalized website.
I also used to use RIF. Have you tried Boost for Lemmy? https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.rubenmayayo.lemmy&hl=en_US
we need a larger userbase, and more niche communities. I try and sub to every new one I see that I'm interested in
Brother Lemmy has slowly taken over my news aggregator usage, conversations are better, with old reddit gone its even more of my usage going to lemmy
Glad to hear this! I really want Lemmy to thrive while Reddit continues its enshitification.
While I miss some hobby subreddits like blender. I lowkey get more inspo off ig, didn't realize how many artists never post or get posted to Reddit. It's a bubble that feels like it has everything. Also seeing other people's work is oddly demotivating and I end up just scrolling/commenting more than I end up doing anything. Applies to any hobby really. I get all the dopamine of discussing stuff and imagining myself doing it, end up not doing it.
League of Comic Geeks replaced the comics sub for me, I wish it had a feed that wasn't just time based tho. (only shows recent posts) Reddit was better for getting reccomendations.
i blocked the politics.world comms, so i wouldnt get any of those posts. only they were becoming quite low key zionists.
God I hope the fediverse gets bigger than it is now
I don't want to be mean but Reddit has a fuckload of really niche and weird interests and hobbies that I happen to be in that lemmy just doesn't have.
Start posting then buddy
Doesn't even need to be niche. There are no active major sports communities, much less local teams, which is about the only pleasure I get from browsing that place anymore through Redlib instances. Among others, BSky built cachet from sports journalists adopting the platform. Attracting a core of these otherwise apolitical mainstream interests may be necessary to kick start the network effect.
Aside, I would say it's ironically the more peculiar cultures I've hung around that never had Reddit or Discord supplant their surviving forums and chat servers that are doing the best these days in consistent quality engagement. While I think the post and threaded comment format inherited from Digg is adequate for news and current events, I hope slower-paced subs seeking to migrate seriously consider if they'd be better served by a different kind of service too.
Haven't checked your post history so saying that generically, but hope must be accompanied by action. So to those that have the same feeling, I invite to look for ways they can help.
There were many art subs that I followed that I don't have the skill, imagination, or time to create and post on. There were many technical subs that I enjoy reading about but know almost nothing about.
Many people don't have time or energy to prepare and share things online, or don't like sharing online, let alone the skill to create the things they would like to read about. There are many types of people in the world with different capacities for different things. Sometimes commenting is the only way some people feel they can participate. Sometimes it's only voting.
I made this firefox extension that might help with the transition. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/reddit-to-lemmy-reposter/
All files are free and opensource here to do whatever you want with it. https://github.com/jamesey10/reddit2lemmy
I don't understand how anyone can be an unpaid mod on that site now. Don't they see articles and headlines about stock prices and shit and wonder why aren't they getting a cut?
have you seen the mods behaviour they love the power they hold. they were also likely forum mods to, and they are just as bad. ive been on 2 forums, 1 was about the armed services, they dont like any contradiction, calling them rude will cause them to spam you(about why you cant join or whatever). and another dislikes the mentioning of anything that labels a certain groups of people(not in a negative or demeaning way).
It appears this has become the tried & tested means of choice to minimize pushback. Users frogs in slowly boiling water.
I got the reddit block about a week ago, so I've given this place another try (first tried it after the reddit API fiasco). I would like lemmy if it were more active. I mostly used reddit for news headlines, and I haven't found any communities here that are nearly as quick for breaking news and whatnot. I feel like my head has been buried in the ground since leaving Reddit. Still not going back though.
You are the activity.
i normally get breaking news far quicker on the microblogging section of the fediverse. have you considered setting up a mastodon account maybe?
I have Mastodon, but I just get infosec updates there. How would I get general news updates as well? Just follow a vunch of media outlets?
Cricket said it good below
AFAIK the key to discovery of content you want in Mastodon is to follow specific hashtags, then follow any accounts that you find interesting from there. There are definitely major network effects on Mastodon. Maybe check #news to see if it might be a good starting point for you.
this
Media outlets usually have RSS feeds, so you could send these feeds to @[email protected] so it generates a bot for tracking each feed.
maybe try surf.social
AITA and all its variant are mostly AI bots/.
I deleted mine. Since there was no "delete all posts" button I used bot that edited all into gibberish. It was funny watching countless private messages from multiple communities begging me not to do it this way. Apparently it makes moderation difficult or something.
It’s wild Reddit doesn’t have a hard deletion of UGC under GDPR rights. If they have a OneTrust portal etc I would love to use it
Thank you for taking the time to salt the earth before leaving. It is important to cause as much headache as possible for the moderators over there while sunsetting an account. I never really contributed anything on reddit so the bridge I burned was via the report button. It felt like hurling turds into a cesspit for someone else to deal with until I got banned. A turd too far.
It's not even about moderation, I couldn't care less about the mods. It was reddit that wanted me to manually click 'delete' button on every single one of my 10k comments from last 13 years, each individually - which is just massively disrespectful. So I used a bot. Free version of the bot was editing into gibberish, paid version offered full deletion. I couldn't care less, just used free version and watched the mayhem. They're free to ban me, report me to admins for breaking ToS, whatever. It would be actually funny if they banned a deleted acocunt.
One of the last straws of disrespect was reddit demanding age verification for me to look at my own post history. It's enshitification all the way.
Finally came over to Lemmy and found this place when the news of age vertificarion started spreading around, along with the annoying pop us of signing it to view the sight. Plus I got tired of how dead and full of bots it was, what makes Reddit think I would want to come back?? 😑
I think bots are inevitable here as well. I think the only thing that keeps them away is how small Lemmy is.
If Lemmy ever became worth anything i dont know how they could effectively counter bots in the age of AI.
defederating with spam instances and hand approving new accounts is how I'd do it. we have years of lessons from email spam we can apply. I suspect that we should start working on this now while there isn't much of a problem
temp emails are usually blocked by some of the platforms too, to lower the spam.
the instances also makes it hard too. its not like a one account for all instances, although you can cross-post and what not.
interesting/interestingasfuck, daminstering, and any of the variations, plus AITA variations thouse are bots.
I'm convinced that at least some of the Aussie subreddits have a lot of "contributions" from lobbyists. As, I quite often see things that don't seem Australian.. Like a lot of weird pro-gun stuff that in Australia we don't have in our culture.
I'd rather not have them here.
Municipal subreddits and local subreddits are absolutely astroturfed, any hot-button topic would always be flooded by hot shit takes that (before they removed your ability to see post history) would prove to be people running through different city subreddits blasting agitprop
It is actually insane how powerful social media as an unfettered platform is for that kind of manipulation
i see alot of indian subs pop up, when there were none before on the main page. im guessing they became prominent after trump started going after Indian visa holders.
Reddit is turning into orange Facebook at this point.
i would also suggest piefed over lemmy; not because one is better than the other but because piefed shows other related communities under a thread and might be easier to come over from reddit in terms of discovery.
also it would be nice to have a master list of communities that match the reddit version.
PieFed definitely has better onboarding
im only staying on lemmy because im used to it and established, only something like they go through mass purging somehow, or some of the instance shutdown i will move over.
old.reddit.com actually stopped working entirely for me today, logged in or not.
The enshittification will continue until every user is gone.
Dust off your VPNs folks, you can still browse old.reddit from a Hong Kong endpoint.
(I probably shouldn't have mentioned this)
RedLib github instance list
I just laughed like a silly little nilly, because I just noticed this late last night after I decided on deleting reddit for good because it was just ragebaiting algo bs anymore. Funny seeing this, this morning, front and center. As someone else stated, all of these social media sites are going the X route for Cash. It's definitely not about "keeping Reddit safe".
I think like some people on here, I only kept Reddit around because I can't find Wrestling related communities, and i don't wanna be a grounds keeper for it. There's no substitute for /r/WoW.. or at least widely used or populated for that matter.
No, no pushing. If they come here, read it and like it, they'll stay.
We're open, you don't need accounts. (unlike all of those google searches that are worth shit now.)
If they don't, let them move on to bsky or threads or whereever they want.
We need promotion outside of the Fediverse.
Post it into your social media and chat groups. discord whatsapp signal telegram facebook and whatever you use.
Don't bother posting it on reddit because the mods or admin will delete it.
depends on the reddit sub, im guessing things like if there is alternative platforum subs, you can mention on those types of subs.
what kind of promotion could you put on a sticker or poster? you could put those up around town
[email protected]
a niche community for feddit.org stickers in the wild. feddit.org is a German speaking Lemmy instance.
Cue the invariable “but what about my niches?!!1!?” I swear some people would stay on Reddit even if Steve Huffman personally killed their family and would kill again unless they got off the platform.
what if your niche is fantasies of steven huffman murdering your family?
I've thought of making a reddit account specifically to find stuff to repost here, but I haven't gotten around to it. what's a good way to go about doing that?
maybe https://lemmit.online/
I got ip banned for basically nothing. Posted a silly comment about nothing, mod banned me, didn't realize and posted with the wrong account on the same group happened a couple of times since I was not paying attention, then bam all my accounts were banned for ban evasion. WTF I didn't even comment anything offensive. Their automatic banning is bullshit. I didn't do anything horrible enough to be site wide banned.
thats sounds like thier AI banning, they just look commalities amongst all your accounts and ban you, first if you were ban some other account, if any of your others participated in that sub all acc get banned. even if an older account participated in a sub that another account got a banned it.
That's exactly what happened. I just wasn't paying attention and made an incident comment (literally "I'm getting old too" ) but because I had been "banned" from that community on another user I was perma banned.. I could go back with a burner phone if I wanted but fuck em
its a retroactive bans, which they never done on such a large scale.
I don't understand why they are banning so many people though, like their whole way to make money is eyeballs on their site, so if you mass ban people you have less people on your site. The banning reasons are so stupid. "You used another account to post on a group you were banned in" without any way to completely block that group from your other accounts so you don't post there by accident. I had like 8 accounts and I just was not paying that much attention to what groups I was posting to. IP bans should not be allowed on such large social media sites. I could see a reasonable time period, you you used a VPN so therefore you tried to evade a community Ban. you get 1 year ban. But a lifetime ban? That's ridiculous.
An analyst I follow says if you can't see logic in a move, chances are you aren't looking with the right premise. Trying to go by that, at least to me, the only premise that matches their behavior is that they want to destroy their own brand.
But if that's the case, the whys still evade me. Are they "burning books" so the only truth is of the AI they're formally feeding? Or perhaps being an open forum, it is a problem with Wiston Smiths about for a while trying to rewrite history? Or perhaps it's a way to tarnish the image of something that despite its flaws, used to work minimally? Or is management of the company a bunch of trend-chasers in damage control mode?
they went public, so spez mightve want to make the site attractive to buyers/investors, to turn it into an ad slop. now its useful pushing out propaganda(eventually for right wing)
were you on a vpn at all? reddit is very picky about that and the ip might have been banned from another user.
Oh no it was me that got banned and yes I had been on a VPN. But I just decided I'm not giving Reddit any of my eyeball time in order for them to make money off of me on ads
reddit hates VPN, im hearing most social media will try to ban people on vpn. the one thing they dont like is not being able to datamine its users. might work on obscure forums though.
I had my first reddit account for 10 years, then went through them every few months to dumb bans. it provides users a natural quitting point and makes gathering data on someone harder, which seem to go against their interests but I saw that's a good thing. let them run it into the ground.
Good, it means we will be forced to move on to better alternatives. No more fallback to the "old" we are used to and thus have a hard time giving up on.
I can still access old reddit from Ireland.
Norway as well.
What is this 'reddit' you're talking about? /j
Maybe to dye something red? Like "you red it"? 🤭
Most real place? Jeez, my gf is realer than that lol
How do you view the lemmy’s logged out? You have to choose an instance or can you irc (or is it icc)it? I don’t really know what I’m talking about so I’m probably using the wrong lingos.
Just go to whatever instance url and you can see what's on this instance as well as what's on the instances it federated with. No need to login for reading. You are logged in lemmy.world so check jlai.lu for example.
Thanks!
If I may add, I'd also suggest picking a more generalist instance to have access to a broader range of posts, like lemmy.zip, lemmy.world (yours), or using other softwares, kbin.earth and piefed.social.
I thought kbin closed?
Dunno its history, but Kbin.earth is Kbin in name only, at least nowadays. The instance is powered by the engine's currently maintened fork, Mbin.
I think most of the lemmy apps will work right away without logging in.
Most of the frontend apps let you browse things unauthenticated as far as I know. You can't post/comment/vote without being signed up though, of course. You can also visit an instance's url directly in the browser to look at things unauthenticated. So for your home instance, you'd just go to "https://lemmy.world/" in your browser. For my home instance, you'd go to "https://sh.itjust.works/" in a browser. Etc for the various other instances out there.
If they are still on Reddit, then they fucking deserve the enshittification.
Lemmy's still too full of incredibly thin skinned snowflakes and tankies for it to get popular
hey, i was only told twice yesterday that i deserve to die by some random drive by commentator.
Well I hope you live forever, motherfucker
I don’t understand the amount of communist talk on this platform. Maybe it’s because it has fewer Americans on it, but we pretty much never think of communism at all.
It basically only ever brought up by right-wing politicians to scare the voter base. Nobody really gives a shit.
one look at modern capitalism makes people want an alternative system
Oh I agree, late stage capitalism sucks. Hard.
I like how he got banned, exactly proving his point.
If you check the Mod Log (accessible through the button under the comment with 3 vertical dots), apparently that user has a history of using ableist slurs, uncivility, and telling users to kill themselves.
If someone like that is complaining about the culture here, the rest of us must be doing something right.
yay for public Mod Log, underrated feature
Not to be dumb but what is a tankie? I've never heard that term before
To add to this: tankies are leftist MAGA. It's not what they (claim to) believe so much as they are toxic trolls who deny facts and reality itself. Discussions with them tend to be very unpleasant, since they use "alternative facts" and incel-style reasoning - e.g. when you block them they are quite proud of how they simply make a new account and keep right on going. No does not mean no to them but rather to simply push harder.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankie You'll start noticing those opinions mainly from specific instances. If it's not your thing, don't hesitate to block communities, users, or whole instances before giving up. You can use Lemmy the way you like.
Thanks!
on lemmy, its usually a far left take on politics. when it comes to specific things like russia, china, N korea, cuba,,,etc. tankies on reddit can mean politics, or specific things like a city/location based sub (how you need to act a certain way or believe a certain way).
so does reddit, its even worst. you wont get banned immediately, but alot of things being said on reddit that gets you banned are the same thing here. like racism, transphobia, bigotry., your comment pretty implies you are a conservatives, they arnt welcome on most platforms.
While I think there's some merit to the idea of talking about the fediverse on corporate legacy social media platforms, I think the best and most effective thing we can do is put in extra effort to engage with the fediverse itself, making posts and comments, building up new communities, and so on.
Reddit is no doubt getting worse and more closed off all the time. They treat their users like shit, or at least, like a resource to be harvested for profit.
But at the same time, Reddit users will sit around complaining about the platform until the cows come up, but when it comes time to do anything about it (like, for example, go check out the fediverse...) they don't ever take any action. And this problem isn't unique to Reddit either, people just love to complain about X on X, complain about Facebook on Facebook, complain about Tiktok on Tiktok, etc. It's hard to tell how much of that is just performative internet shit vs genuine addiction to their particular algorithm of choice, but in my view it's a real problem...
In other words, the question is "where we should be spending our energy?"
Should we be spending it on Reddit, trying to convince a bunch of people (who frankly range from ambivalent to straight-up addicted) that Reddit sucks? Or should we spend it here on the fediverse building the communities from the ground up?
I mostly agree, but I don't think it should be 100%. How did any of us get here? Almost certainly it was someone talking on the legacy platforms. We shouldn't spend time trying to convince people to join, but some people should spend some time spreading the word that the alternatives exist, and why they're better. Honestly, I don't think we want the users that need convincing. We do want the users who see the advantage and leave on their own, but they need to know about it first.
spreading the word is good, but those platforms censor us explicitly so it's of limited value. we need alternative ways
Most frictionless places to push for I think would be in sites like linktr.ee and in the bio of services that aren't direct competitors. Though also of minimal benefit if you're not a public figure (journalist, artist, developer, someone actively posting whatever, etc.)
The only thing that's confusing to me, is like there is not a pottery group on here but I have no idea how to make one. I tried to figure it out I have no idea how to make an instance or anything.
You don't need to create an instance (requires server administration skills), just a community (requires a few clicks). On the top right menu, there should be a create community entry.
Thanks I'll try it
when you search for a community, make sure you're searching "All" communities instead of just "Local" communities
this one already exists ![email protected]
THANK YOU! I did look but I don't understand the fediverse at all. The instances are confusing. Like I joined discuss.online but is that the same as lemmy? Idk I think Reddit has so many users because it's easy and clear to use
Discuss.Online is one of the BEST instances! It has super-high uptime, meaning the admin team is very highly technically proficient. I left other instances due to very long delays causing problems, but I rarely to never experience such things with Discuss.Online.
In case it helps, Lemmy is the name of the software that is being run, which implements the ActivityPub Protocol that makes the Threadiverse (the threaded conversion style subset of the Fediverse, different from the microblog style of Mastodon) happen. Then Discuss.Online (DO) is the name of the "instance" (a server machine, running Linux as the OS). Our primary admin is I believe m_f, since jgrim the owner stepped back a bit to take care of his newborn child.
DO will share content with everyone else on the Threadiverse - not only other instances running Lemmy software but also PieFed, mBin, nodeBB, soon flarum may be added, and more. That's the beauty of federation: you aren't limited to just your instance, or even just Lemmy, you will access all of it, at once. I am not sure how your apps/clients handle things but I know that some of them hide the instance names - you can turn them on if you prefer to see them? It helped me get a better feel for the place - e.g. Lemmy.World holds about half of all users on the Threadiverse, and perhaps 90% of the most active communities (but people are trying to change that, to mix things up so that it's not all in one place like that!!).
I guess you already know that a "community" is like a "subreddit", which we denote like c/pottery rather than r/pottery, and then add the instance name. That said, the absolute best way to refer to it is with the exclamation point !, then community name, the at symbol @, then the instance name. This will make a link that anyone from any app can follow to navigate directly to the community. Like this: ![email protected].
DO would be happy to host a potty community here! See in the sidebar text:
That said, the other community mentioned, the one on Lemmy.world (LW) seems to be struggling mightily, with only a single person posting to it and zero active moderators (the single mod there hasn't posted or commented anything in the past 3 years). So you might talk to the single person that is posting, [email protected] (if I had put an at @ symbol in front of their name, it would have tagged them, sending them a notification and making it into a link), and see if they want to collaborate with you, either here on DO or over there on LW. Either way you might make a friend of mutual interest!:-D And/or just start posting in that community and see what happens:-). Others occasionally do that I see, it's just far more rare. If you did make a community here, expect to have to do similarly: people won't know right away and you'd be the only one posting for a LONG time, perhaps a year or more. The Threadiverse just does not have a large userbase to support communities, especially outside of tech or politics.
Thank you so so much for your reply. It helped me understand a lot better! I already am using discuss! I really appreciate your answer
You are very welcome! 🤗
To @[email protected], if you make a community, either the pottery one if you feel like making a second one or any other community, feel free to post about the newly made community to either/both ![email protected] and ![email protected].
The more people follow a given community, the more it propagates whenever a post is made, and the more it propagates, the higher is the chance of someone feeling like interacting with the community or even following. And making the post to either/both communities helps giving an initial boost, though persistence in keeping posting until it gains traction should still be needed.
yes that's a part of Lemmy, that's all you need
It's kinda like email. Think of it like you're on Gmail, I'm on Yahoo Mail, and the pottery community is on MSN. We can all talk to each other because we do like
@[email protected](in reality you're atdiscuss.online) and@[email protected](I'm atretrolemmy.com). Usernames start with an@like Twitter, community names start with an!So when you do a "Local" search you only see stuff from "Gmail" like yourself, but usually you want to search "All" not "Local".
For viewing posts on my feed I prefer "Subscribed", this can be set as your default in your settings page.
have you tried an app on your phone? they can be a bit simpler to use than the website https://join-lemmy.org/apps
here's another community that might help ![email protected]
I'm using the brave app, and thank you so much! So far I've been able to create a question on one of the groups! Yay!
I don't see your post. I think in Brave you would have to click to expand the Sidebar in order to make a post
for a phone I would better suggest Boost, Connect, or Summit
https://join-lemmy.org/apps
Yes I'm also using the boost app. I go back and forth depending what device I'm on
Yeah, came to say more or less the same thing. I genuinely believe we're big enough where we don't need to tell people we exist. We can spend our time making the fediverse a better place so that anyone coming to look for an alternative to Reddit can look at the fediverse and think "that looks like a cool place".
I'd guess there is a balance to be struck.
I got banned from reddit, and it took me 2 weeks to think to search up "reddit like alternatives." This is not a problem with disenchantment with Reddit, this a problem with Fediverse visibility.
Would you search up "reddit like alternatives" if you hadn't been banned? And if someone came on Reddit a few days before you got banned and said to you "hey, this is the Fediverse, come join us", would you join, or would you say "I have no reason to leave Reddit or to use any other Reddit-like platform"?
I also don't it's a "disenchantment" problem. I believe it's more of a "refusing to change because it takes effort" problem
honestly, in the months leading up to it I may just have. The AI posting ragebait problem was/is getting very untenable over there and it would have been a nice safety valve to come here and gripe about the world without having to dance around corporate boilerplate ass covering "rules" governing what you can and and can't say. I suppose you're not without a point though. Hindsight is 20/20 after all.
EDIT: Oops! I accidentally wrote a wall of text!
I knew about AI models generating posts, but I never really thought about how problematic it could get. I don't know much about Reddit's rules, mostly because I left the platform before people started complaining of getting banned left and center, but I did hear a lots of people complaining about it here on Lemmy.
I'm sorry if I jumped the gun and started making assumptions about you right away. I have friends that still use X, despite knowing how bad that platform is, and how unhealthy scrolling through a feed on that platform can get, and even despite knowing there are alternatives (one of them tried Bluesky once, but quit it because "it just wasn't the same thing"). I just assumed you were in a not-so-different situation before getting banned, even though I don't know anything about you.
It also doesn't help that I just assumed that everyone had heard about the existence of Reddit alternatives when the Reddit API protests happened. I completely forgot that lots of people came to Reddit after that, or weren't even using the platform during the protest despite having an account. I forgot that there are probably some people that didn't notice the protests because of their favourite subreddits being unaffected by it, and that it's also very likely that there were a ton of people that were affected by it, but knew nothing about why it was happening. And there could be even others that knew about why it was happening, but didn't know that people were starting to look for alternatives. I just assumed that people who stayed behind on Reddit after the protests chose to stay behind after hearing about platforms like Lemmy because changing platforms was too much work.
Thanks for opening my eyes :)
Despite it all, I don't see Lemmy as being a platform with a community that is super accessible for every single human in the planet, so I don't think it's exclusively an advertisement issue. Not that that's a problem that needs to be fixed, I just think that you'd have to partly remove the platform's "soul" if you wanted to make it more accessible for it to grow. As far as I know, Lemmy wasn't made to "kill" Reddit. It was made to be a place where people can hang out with other people who care about the same topics :)
i only went to lemmy because i remember it was mentioned during the API crisis, when i got banned from reddit when they used AI to massively target everyone. i do have a few forums as a backup i go sometimes.
lemmy world is the top result when searching reddit alternatives. I agree the best thing you can do is to make this a good active community, anyone who is done with reddit will have no trouble finding their way here.
If Reddit account is still available and you've got the time & energy to convince some people to switch - go for it. Make sure to not enrich Reddit with anything else. I've decided against this way, because I wasn't sure if I'm still talking to real people and the possibilities of spreading the word are very limited (posts often get deleted by mods).
Feels much better to feed the fediverse with content in my opinion.
reddit is becoming like fb, bots and more bots.
We definitely need the 1.0 release of Lemmy now more than ever... Keep up the good work devs btw!
Yay devs!
im never going back to ad supported algorithmic brainwashing. decentralized open source, or nothing for me
Yeah Lemmy is the last place before I just go hang out in parks and be outside
You should stand on a box and shout at people for the irl social media experience
Just holding up images of memes outside
I’d toss a quarter in yer bucket for that.
TODAY'S TOP MEMES AT ELEVEN A FROG WONDERS ABOUT NIGHT SOUP. MORE IN FIVE MINUTES
For a second I thought that "eleven a frog" was a time of day.
ELEVEN A FROG NOW A TIME NEW MEMES IN FIVE
Me neither. But god damn if I just want a thriving community where I can get lost in threads on subtopics of topics that I’ve never heard of in my life.
You gotta share links to people, that's how it spreads. They open it once wtf website is this? Oh that's fediverse, what? Dont worry about it. But you send them a couple more memes from here, and then they finally wanna comment on something and they make an account.
make a piefed feed. that way they avoid the politics and tech:
If i avoided politics and tech there'd be no more content left for me XD
Yes, I was burned too many times. First Digg, than Reddit. That's already one too many.
Digg came and went so fast it was weird. Usually I'd expect administration to wait a little while longer before deciding it's not worth it.
Moved over here after I kept getting a popup I couldn't close pushing their app.
Reddit is finally dead to me. Good riddance.
I'm so sick of everybody and their dog trying to strongarm me into using their app.
You should take his word for it, my dog's app is in fact the goodest app.
My cat would end me if I took a dogs advice.
FYI, in case you ever absolutely NEED it (people still post actual content sometimes only on Reddit that simply does not exist here on the Threadiverse), YSK that Ublock Origin has opt-in "annoyance filters" that definitely takes care of that popup.
Obligatory fuck spez anyway:-P.
Fortunately AI bots (which they claim this supposed prevent them from siphoning the content) don't use uBlock /s
welcome welcome, do you know your way around?
A million and one people said they'd leave Reddit if
old.got shut down. Let's see if they come.Well, I'm just one, but here I am. I left reddit a few days ago when they forced login for
old. I'm having fun learning about lemmy and fediverse now.I didn’t leave I was asked not to come back
I left and didn't go back.
I'm not sure that's the flex you think it is
You get banned there for saying trump rapes children, it's like the emperor has no clothes except instead of fake clothes, it's raping children. Fuck reddit dude.
I got banned for saying US healthcare is a scam and should be a human right, got banned for it
Reddit bans you for not being a rightoid these days.
I've long suspected these companies were doing this, but now it's overt
they ban you for even looking at the site wrong. apparently they dont like "non organic behaviour" like comment too fast after account creation, old inactive accounts become active, or comment in subs(rare) that have some kind of requirement. you are also measured on a hidden thing called CQS score. other things is if your fingerprinting is off.
They also ban you for suggesting Fascists need to fuck off. They tell you its "inciting violence."
Fuck Reddit. They caved to the fucking Nazis.
Bro they ARE the fucking nazis, ghislaine maxwell is literally a known supermod, the owners are trump funders.
spez loves Musk.
dont even need to say anything, just having a account with sudden activity is enough. plus they do waves of purges.
their AI moderation is terrible now, and it's ruining the website.
Honestly it's been great because the login lock finally has broken my doom scrolling habit. Lemmy helps me keep a pulse on some of my interests without being a firehose of bs that was r/all. Mental health and sleep habits have been soaring lol
Lemmy needs to grow organically, so communities can form their own cultures, instead of importing it wholesale from the largest forum on the internet.
This period has been regarded as the "golden age" of every successful social media website.
Getting big comes with its own problems. This isn't an IPO, no one is trying to juice stock price, there's absolutely zero reason to rush shit.
i think its stagnant, because too many scattered when an instance just vanishes to other platform. and reddit isnt likely going through another wave of purges anytime soon.
Why bother, if they want a good community they will seek one out. Growth isn’t necessarily good for this place.
Overgrowth certainly would have some drawbacks, but stagnation probably isn't good either
I find the fediverse to be quite lively (more than reddit) even if it doesnt have 5 posts a second. Quality > Quantity. Would rather have 1 good post that gets engagement than 10 shitposts nobody ever sees.
goes back to lemmy where every 10th post is a shitpost about beans
https://youtu.be/7ZWQMvHNOnI
Bump. (he he he) :p
I'd say the fediverse is somewhat protected against the drawbacks of growth in a way Reddit isn't.
As long as instance owners can handle the traffic, yes.
eh, kinda? Decentralisation means one instance can learn from the failures of another, and there's bo one thing that can bring the entire Fediverse down. But that's a worst case scenario.
What I fear is this: A spike of interest in the fediverse leads to many instances being overwhelmed, and the general newbie experience quickly turns many people away, leading to lots of people leaving with a sour taste. In the meantime, instances successfully adapt and new ones spring up, but most users aren't coming back.
Imo that's a more realistic scenario than some grandiose failure, and you could say it's already happened several times.
they could just disable signups when they get too many users, or maybe use an invite system to limit signups
Well yeah, that's what being overwhelmed means
It'd be a good way to get people to spread out and make sure they don't all join the same instance
Blåhaj has that, works pretty well
Yeah, and we shouldn't push too hard before the devs make the experience easy enough. But the worst that I see coming from it is a slower adoption rate.
ee was overwhelmed and it was a large instance apparently.
we at least need to make sure we don't shrink, which can sneak up on you and be difficult to stop, better to maintain some growth
Also we need a stream of new users to replace leaving users (there will always be churn), especially when an instance goes down many users won't signup again
I agree, make the place too big and it will become unmanageable the same way it went for reddit.
we do need growth because its quite stagnant and contracted since instances keep disappearing. the problem with reddit is they allow alot of botting, astroturfing going on. with the last big instance shutting down i noticed it became super stagnant.
I haven’t posted on Reddit since they killed third-party apps. Funny thing is, I was a paid subscriber for years before they did that.
Here to be the change I want to see in the world. Go Lemmy.
I got hit with that BS yesterday. They claimed it's to "keep reddit safe" lol. Just say it's because you want more money.
They're only doing it to stop scrapers from having free access to posts. That's their main product right now and they want to make sure they get paid for it.
No, just no. Just stay off reddit lmao, not trying to be harsh or whatever but it's a very simple answer.
there will definitely be some users over there that discover the fediverse and join us, there will also be some that won't. And we don't want them all to come, ghislane maxwell can stay on reddit forever from her country club prison computer, for example.
So just keep doing whatever it is you're doing to contribute to the fediverse, either by being a powermod or just a lurker, and as the fediverse grows and adapts it will attract those it should attract.
Going back and contributing to a website owned by literal trump funders just seems like a complete nonstarter to me.
Idk, tell your IRL friends, discord friends whoever, sure, i just don't think posting on reddit is the answer to doing anything positive for the fediverse.
I second that!
It's a similar situation with Youtube. People keep complaining about the enshittification, yet they keep giving their audience to the Google platform. People could argue "Oh, nah, I use Invidious/yt-dlp/Grayjay/etc, I don't give Youtube my clicks" and this is a very naive take, because in the end of the day Indivious/yt-dlp/etc still rely on Youtube, and these peple are relying on content maintained by Youtube.
I myself have been boycotting Youtube for two years and counting, and I never looked back.
Yes, Youtube and Reddit have gazillions of content. Yes, we're often unable to find said content anywhere else. Yes, life can become more hard if we refrain from said content. But while we keep seeking their content (even, and especially, through circumvented manners), they will keep enshittifying because they know they have what the complaining people are ultimately seeking and they know people are seeking it so badly. Once we finally stop, maybe, just maybe, situation would reverse and Youtube and Reddit will be the ones seeking us so badly.
[email protected]
The only thing I use YouTube for (and I can't believe people use it for anything other than) is tutorials. Like I need to replace the window actuator in my car and I can look it up how to do it and there's a video. I can't believe people watch you tube like a streaming service. It's kind of mind-blowing to me that people watch as much as they do. Like literally the only thing I use it for is tutorials.
those people are the worst, i see them complaining about youtube on the YT subreddit, and they go on defending it when you point out the pervasiveness of rightwing content, and people like mr beast getting views. i was saying which is it, do you like youtube or you dont. and no i wont be logging in to youtube just to curate my feed, google wants this so they sell this part of your data.
I didn't even know who Mr beast was until last year That's how much I don't watch YouTube
i dint know he was a pos, when the drama hit. the part where had to do a "commercial" video about Lunchly because shit was hititng the fan at the time. everyone likened the video to a jihadist in a cave meeting and the people, other influencers had a gun to thier heads. people were likely critcizing him, but i was saying why are you giving him attention, and i was like comparing him to right wing content, that is forced by youtube. and they started saying"we dont get that if yuo curate a feed, you must be searching out the content" wierd way of defending youtube.
Oh she has an unbanned account over there I'm sure
Being over here for about a month I’m finding being kicked out of Reddit isn’t that rare
One of us! One of us!
Her main account (which was once the reddit account with the highest amount of karma) is not banned and still a moderator of many big subreddits
https://old.reddit.com/user/maxwellhill
I always browsed Reddit without logging in, created an account once, and deleted it hours later because the algorithmic feed was too much filtering for me. I want to click on posts as a one-off without permanently altering the way the platform sees me. Now I can‘t browse Reddit anymore, which gave me the final push over to Lemmy. It‘s tragic how much collective knowledge we lost though, as the „You scrolled too much!“ tracking/blocking also applies to search results.
in old reddit, i use the all function, you can filter out the subs you dont want your feed. i did it to subs.
Fun fact, safereddit.com still works perfectly fine as a frontend in my experience! (not the only one out there, just an instance of redlib If you need to bypass the login requirement just add "safe" before "reddit" in the URL and it should let you in :)
I’ve been wondering about this- how are redlib sites still working if the authwall is being made more restrictive?
As far as I'm aware, Redlib gets around blocks in two ways. The partially implemented client-side blocks I presume are by just stripping the code (e.g. seeing the post but it's greyed out and has a popup saying "sign in" in front of it, or when your whole screen is a login page but all the actual content was already loaded in the background, deleting that code means you can read the post just fine)
And the rest is just tricking Reddit by mimicking the request format & behavior of the Android Reddit app, which tricks Reddit into believing the user is supposed to be allowed access or shouldn't be rate limited, because obviously anybody using the app is a real signed-in user... I guess? (this information is from their GitHub page's README but I'm not sure exactly how all this works under the hood)
Fun fact, unless you are a social media manager for a company trying to astroturf content, you are under zero obligation to go on Reddit again ever.
Well, there are some subreddits that simply do not have an equivalent community on Lemmy, or any other place on the internet. /r/steroids for example. Eroids.com is fine, but does not have the same quality standards when it comes to moderation
It's always worth pushing for the fediverse.
Meh, leave them be, if people are interested they will find Fediverse.
Diffusion of innovation theory might apply here
sooner or later they will follow the FB method, require facial recognition, ID scans. and google which is the most common email reddit usually attaches to account started thier more invasive datamining, by requiring QR code scan with your phone to make an account on google.
I'm leaving any platform that tries this without a second thought. Already left discord. Left reddit and joined here with the account requirement (even though I have an account, just hate the principle).
google is allegedly doing it to stop spamming with thier requiring yuor phone to scan qr code, we know they just want your phone details, and that benefits reddits own datamining, fingerprinting too.
Reddit is dead to me. I blocked them at the router at my house. I should redirect them to a landing page that says simply.
"Don't be a sucker"
Good thing piefed.social is following in reddits footsteps! Oh wait that's really bad
I'm out of the loop. What are they doing...?
CCP-style shadow profiling, among other things.
Trying to recreate a worse version of reddit karma and locking their instance behind a login page/requiring an account to view anything
I just opened piefed.social in a private window and it works fine
Was not like that yesterday
slightly less worst than fb, fb would block people unless they login.(there is a workaround with ublock though.
Been so long since I tried using Facebook. And haven't tried threads.
Just sad how many are following in the Twitter footsteps of everything needing a login like it's a support page
Good thing it's not the only instance, and that you can also host your own instance.
If someone sees an instance requiring an account to do anything on they'll think anything using that software will require one.
Also almost like the point isn't about if you can host it yourself or there are other instances when the main dev is literally doing what everyone is angry reddit is doing 🤔
Oh, this is about the login wall?
lol that was just a temporary measure to fend off the scrapers. They've been really bad the last couple of weeks, especially.
I'm testing out a custom-built Anubis now, that should mean we can do without a login wall.
datamining perhaps, i would be wary too.
In what way?
I can't say otherwise you would call it harassment and push for all instances to ban me/anyone else that explains it again
You know, the ways you've been told. Are you this dense?
I was also prompted to log into the new reddit earlier today (as in full blocking login popup of the kind you see with news paywalls), so even that is off the table.
I actually just got the "You used old.reddit.com you need to log in to view" and decided to see if any more people had adopted Lemmy. It's more active than it was last time I was here, but probably still not active enough to move most casuals.
I'll probably come back for the next couple days and re-build my communities, and see if it can keep my attention, but I'm not holding my breathe.
It's unfortunate that Mastodon has also struggled, I'm glad Bluesky exists as an alternative but it would be nice to see federation more widely adopted by the masses. Maybe in time, with constant growth.
I saw the r/FauxMoi post today about the subreddit being marked sensitive information and de-prioritized by the algorithm and it's clear enshittification is in full swing, so it's just a matter of time before Reddit is mostly abandoned.
This is kind of my problem here. There's a lot of hobby based communities in Reddit that hasn't made the move and pretty dead over here so it's what keeps dragging me back.
But gah, the new style is completely unreadable to me.
Unfortunately the only way to change that requires work. If community is dead it won't become active unless someone will post there and we might need to be the ones to do it.
If you have some community that you would like, start posting there (if you don't know content you can copy from Reddit) as long as there is content and people interested in it, it will grow, but someone has to do the dirty work unfortunately.
In the beginning it might be better to create generalized communities that encompass multiple topics so it would be easier to find people. Not start with very specific ones. That's how Reddit grew.
Exactly there's a lot and I mean a lot of very specific niche communities that you just can't find help with issues on any other platform. Especially stuff like health insurance denials and stuff like niche hobbies. I personally am pretty upset because they banned me over essentially nothing. And yes while it is my own fault because I had more than one username and posted in a community that I had been "banned" from a secondary username. I had absolutely no idea they would completely obliterate all of my logins and make it so I absolutely could not use Reddit at all. The IP banning nonsense should be illegal on a platform as big as Reddit, YouTube, Facebook, and Google. When they are essentially the biggest social medias they should not be able to ban you permanently for things that are basically nothing.
same, some tgc games, catching up on drama on certain tgc industry like mtg. PTGC, things that involves plants, animals, and a nich yt channel, location based subs.
Mastodon has a decent usercount, but I really wish they would at least put a minimal effort into working with the Threadiverse better. It would be a huge improvement if they just made it so following a group/community didn't put all of the comments on your main feed. Also rendering the contents of Threadiverse posts instead of just giving you the title and link to it.
https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/17008
https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/139
Mastodon seems to really not care about any other platforms aside from themselves.
Maybe some other microblogging platform will take over some day, like Catodon.
What Threads is doing is an old strategy of embrace, extend, extinguish.
Google did the same thing with XMPP. When it joined it was welcomed then they introduced incompatible features to encourage existing users to switch to their GTalk. Eventually they "accidentally" broke communication so anyone on XMPP couldn't talk with users on GTalk and effectively killed XMPP.
I'm confused, I didn't mention Threads. I think we actually did a good job of keeping Threads out and they already kinda gave up on ActivityPub
Threadiverse = Lemmy+Mbin+PieFed, it's a term older than Meta's Threads
Yeah, as you suspected, I wasn't familiar with that term and wrongly assumed it was about Threads. My bad.
Thanks for the clarification.
Any pushing you can do is probably not going to help. Last time it was some API shit that actually generated a small amount of outrage enough to move a small amount of people. Apathy, habit and lock-in will tend to defeat that, so unless this gets people at least as pissed as whatever the API thing was, I wouldn't hold my breath.
Also, y'know, reddit... maybe it's just as well.
With honestly a large number of general web searches being reddit results on virtually any topic, I think the need for login will gradually frustrate many into seeking out the fediverse. It could take a long time, though. It also may not have a huge effect passively, because there is a high chance that the information they want isn't here.
I agree, it's super frustrating to be IP banned (over nonsense essentially) and whenever I look something up reddit is the first option to look at
google prioritizes reddit, because reddit allows google to scrape for AI and datamining.
Yeah, but of people can't view the content without logging in, I can definitely see people being frustrated by that.
Honestly I've given up on encouraging people to do things to better themselves. We've had open source technology for a very long time. The Fediverse has been pretty mature for a good while now. Xitter and Reddit have been through many rounds of appalling enshittification, not to mention Meta.
RSS is as old as the internet but people overwhelmingly choose Apple News and other dumb shit.
Email is as old as the internet but people overwhelmingly choose corporate platforms like Gmail.
Podcasts are ancient but people overwhelmingly choose to use platforms like Spotify, and worse, YouTube.
People just overwhelmingly make bad decisions, and have been for decades so, yeah, I'm exhausted.
I used to ask people to switch and they would ask "why?" and I would be so appalled that they would even ask the question because, how could you not know any of the litany of reasons to get off this fucking platform?
Sometimes they ask and I explain and then the only thing that changes is that they think I'm a weirdo.
So while I agree with many of your comments, I would say people who are not computer people don't know anything about the things that you listed. Sure there's other email servers than Google, but here's the thing do people know that? When you buy an Android phone it forces you into a Google login. There's no other way around it. And then most people just use that because that's what they know. The same thing with RSS, I would not begin to know where to even find a community that is on RSS. Like what does that even mean? most people don't know what all of these things that you listed mean. And it's not because we're lazy, it's because those things like Gmail and Reddit are easy to access Before I got IP band from Reddit I had no idea that lemmy or the fediverse existed. I still don't know how to make a category that I can post on. I have no idea how to make a server, I don't have the money to buy extra computer stuff to do anything other than use my phone. People who program software and are computer programers understand the back end. Those of us who don't have any idea of any kind of programming don't know how to use anything but what is readily available. And yes I'm trying to learn but it's not easy.
If they cared at all, they would find out.
people go where the content is. That's just the nature of the beast. Like I'm pissed at the reddit mods for kicking me off of reddit more because that's were 90% of the minecraft community lives, (most of the reason I used reddit in the first place) and less because they got the ass pains for me calling them out on their corporate bootlicking behavior.
Something has been lost over the past 15-20 years. It's like nobody has the mindset anymore of the world wide web era. Where's the curiosity. Where's the discovery. Where's the malleability to find something new to you and try it. Inertia has locked them into subservience.
The internet flipped upside down. It was new frontier for you to explore. Now you lay there as it spoon feeds you.
People have been quantified into units. So they can be packaged and sold as datasets. They're boxed into what the ad industry categorizes them as. This person is an Apple News user, reddit user, and Youtube watcher. That user is on Twitter and Facebook. Much more fine grained than just what platforms they use of course. They told the system what they like and the system built a reinforced box around them. And then charge them for an air tube for good measure.
We are far gone from the days where a user would be so excited to post a wall of text about using a thing that another user doesn't know about. These days the reaction is more likely to be,"Who are? Who sent you?!? What's your real motive???" Skepticism. Distrust. Paranoia.
Often these days, outright indifference. People know these platforms fuck with their minds. With public conscious. They mould the world we live in. People don't care. The world chose to be Cypher. They wanted to be plugged into the Matrix.
Though that's not really a good analogy because outside the system isn't a desolate landscape. The outside world is still normal.
Exactly. The vast majority know how terrible they are, but continue to subject themselves to it anyway. Why? Lack of self-respect? Unwillingness to explore and learn new things? I don't get it.
The Fediverse has shown me that what these companies have isn't anything special, aside from the network. People don't go there for the software, they go there for the people. But they can't move the people to new/other software.
sounds like an addiction, people are addicted them.
there are so many podcasts on YT. i do follow 1 or 2, mostly actors of movies/shows thier experiences during thier time on the show. political or news is no-go for many reasons, and if you choose something related to "relationship" it will try to reccomend unwanted things on the feed.
This may be unpopular to say here, but the fediverse needs to be less toxic for the average user. I'm probably going to be downvoted to hell for this, but here goes: the whole tesseract situation was a clusterfuck and the dev is a jackass, but in one regard he is right - there is a toxicity problem. I mean, let's look at it:
Lemmy's main dev is what many would refer to as a tankie. He regularly spreads misinformation, supporting fascist governments, so long as they claim to be socialist or communist - and don't belong to the west. Anything the West does is, by definition, evil.
Lemmy's flagship instance is lemmy.ml. An instance where many communities have a "be nice" rule, but say anything against the (similarly aligned) group think and you'll be ridiculed, insulted, and banned. Meanwhile, some pretty insane calls for violence stay up. And lemmy.ml isn't even the worst in that corner of the fediverse.
There are many other instances that aren't great, either. Wander into an instance and accidentally say something absolutely factual that someone doesn't like - ban, because some thin skinned mod sees it as derogatory. Remember the whole dragonfucker saga? Yeah, that's very off-putting to your average user.
Look, I'm no stranger to Reddit group think, I've had it turn on me, and trust me, it's no fun. Hell, I've had it on Facebook back when that was still a thing (yeah, I'm dating myself here). But it was nothing on what I've seen on here. I've been able to avoid it here (or, sometimes I've purposefully wandered into it in an attempt to disrupt an echo chamber, but then I knew exactly what I was getting into and expected as much), but what I saw happening to others - holy shit. I mean, to be fair, the instance I'm on is an instance that very rarely defederates, which I like because I like seeing different viewpoints including ones with which I vehemently disagree with (although the viewpoints are very unbalanced, that does have to be said). But it's a hell of a lot more fun to not have to keep your guard up all the time.
So, you might argue, be careful which instance you chose. OK, so I chose an instance like Lemmy.world, which as far as Lemmy goes, is definitely more on the normal side of things. But then, who are they federated with? The next rabbit hole. And how do you know which ones have less crazies? Experience. And as a saying goes, experience is what you needed just before you got it. Then many people suggest putting together blocklist and what not. Another rabbit hole. Put briefly: it involves work, a lot of it. People aren't on Reddit to work (for the most part), they're there to have fun. If you need to put in so much work, at some point it's not fun anymore. And that's what's off-putting for the typical user.
What can be done to make it more palatable for normal users? I honestly don't know. I see it as a chicken and egg problem. We need more "normal" people to drown out the crazies, but then the "normal" people won't come because of the crazies. Maybe Piefed is better in that regard - although I've heard there were/are?tesseract-style problems there, as well - I just haven't had the nerve to go down yet another rabbit hole to figure out what's actually going on. Which brings us back to square one - that's already gone way, way too far for the average user. And I can't exactly blame them. I'm "only" here because I care about open source and decentralisation. And I insist on staying here on matter of principle. But I can't in good faith recommend it to anyone I know IRL.
Anyway, sorry for the long rant. Maybe someone has some better ideas.
Hell yeah.
The issue with PieFed is that it is "opinionated". First, most of that is disinformation that the original people refused to correct (last I checked) even after being demonstrably proven wrong, like the main dev Rimu literally showed screenshots of the code to prove that it wasn't "hard-coded" as they had claimed, but nobody cared. In-group (Lemmy, as in those on the main disinformation spreading platform Lemmy.ml)=good, while out-group (choosing to see PieFed as their "opponent", despite VEHEMENT claims previously that we all should just try to get along in the Threadiverse and that Lemmy should not be singled out to be criticized in any way, a classic case of one rule for me while a different rule for thee)=bad.
Beyond the disinformation though, the software truly is opinionated. Every such feature is at worst opt-out, and most are even opt-in, but the lack of transparency about the disclosure (vaguely similar to the Tesseract dev scenario as you mentioned, although that one was to an extreme degree) definitely turns people off. Admins of multiple instances were suddenly surprised by the vote quota, not realizing what was happening on their own machines, as this MAJOR structurally breaking and exceedingly poorly and incompletely implemented "feature" was dropped like a bomb onto them, yet with barely any mention, buried like literally 20 items deep into a very long listing along with minutiae - almost like the software didn't just implement a shadow-censoring change that rejects contributions from both people on the same instance that the community is located on plus EVEN LEMMY (and Mbin, and nodeBB, etc.) but WITHOUT TELLING ANYONE. All because the main dev had an itch to scratch, and then rammed it through despite everyone pushing back majorly in the chats, and despite some VERY well-known and most highly-active contributors on the entire Threadiverse quitting the platform in protest. And then most telling of all is how he responded to people asking about it - note the title of that post is "Upvotes turn green but number doesn't change", i.e. this "anti-feature" is causing bugs left and right, breaks the entire model of the ActivityPub Protocol and existing modes of how the Threadiverse has worked until now, and Rimu's response is that he felt (no evidence btw, see his linked post that fails to demonstrate the premise, as everyone in its comment section agrees) that people were voting too much, so he took that right away, citing how the end-users need to simply "Get creative" and live with the suddenly and only partially implemented and barely announced anti-feature, seemingly created on a whim with no advanced or even current notice as it was being rolled out, and against the advice of pretty much everyone, with the best case scenario being that people are mainly neutral (except like one prominent supporter, but notably I only counted one, vs. like a veritable MOUNTAIN of push-back!!).
So understandably, this kills people's enthusiasm and worse yet, their hopes that PieFed could be the future of the Threadiverse. One reason for that is that the Lemmy devs are quite opinionated themselves, and have been known to do similarly in the past - e.g. when they implemented an English word slur word filter, which they ACTUALLY did hard-code right in (most of the detractors of PieFed seem to keep claiming that PieFed did this, which it did not, but in contrast Lemmy actually did do that at one point in time), and then moreover adamantly refused to change it, telling people to simply fork the code if they did not like it. Tbf, they did later relent on this and made the feature able to be disabled with an option.
And that is one thing notable about the kind-hearted Rimu: this extremely unpopular and not transparently disclosed at all anti-feature of having implementing a vote quota was made to be opt-out. It would have been better to have made it opt-in, better still to have told people about it properly, even better still to have listened to all the advice and simply not done it at all, especially until it could be done properly, but at least he took the effort to make it able to be easily disabled, by an environmental variable controllable outside of the docker container. That is not nothing. (Edit: I mean to say that it is rather the opposite of nothing: it demonstrates a consideration for the needs of others who may have different viewpoints than the dev - i.e. even while being opinionated, it is not to the same degree as how Lemmy's slur word filter was handled. Both were imperfect, but managed differently.)
Back to the Lemmy devs now: the software seems equally opinionated to me, although more in the sense of features that it refuses to implement, than in features that it does. e.g. Reddit has no modlog but it does have a modmail, and notifications to the user that their content was moderated, and the ability for anyone with the link to continue to see and even converse in a deleted post. PieFed has roughly half of these features, but Lemmy has zero of them. Lemmy is quite authoritarian in its design philosophy - it offers supreme power to an instance admin (even the ability to hide events from the modlog), somewhat less so to community moderators, but very little to none at all to individual end-users. Like why did the devs decide not to even so much as notify users that they have been banned from an entire instance or community, instead leaving them to find out the hard way? May glorious leader live forever!! The power differential there is extreme - even people using Reddit are granted more rights (e.g. to be notified of removed content) than users of Lemmy?
I am tired of making excuses for Lemmy, as if it will ever get any better. It's been over three years since the Rexodus and I've seen some features actively get worse - e.g. after you banned an entire instance, the people thus "banned" used to not be able to send you DMs and trigger notifications, but then the devs claimed that was confusing and added the ability for these BANNED users to send you DMs and thereby harass you as much as they please from newly-created troll accounts. Lemmy software truly sucks in so many ways.
And recently I am also now tired of defending PieFed as well, after the shadow-censorship of implementing a vote quota without telling anyone or listening to feedback.
But at least both are FOSS, both are free, both provide an alternative to corporate enshittification, while each adding their own forms of enshittification, and each helps people get away from the corporate Algorithm, while substituting that for our own versions of undisclosed Algorithmic control.
And yes, people on the Threadiverse are toxic as fuck. See e.g. my very own reply right now, daring to criticize the devs providing us all with free software, emo-venting my fee-fees all over the place, mixing it together with facts and hopefully not but potentially some anti-facts as well (please do correct me if you see that I am wrong!). Whatever software platform someone is on, I would hope that we would always try to remember the human.
As someone who is not programming literate, using the fetiverse has been very frustrating. It's very confusing, it's very difficult to figure out the different categories or whatever they're called. Reddit is very straightforward basically you want to find out about watercolor painting you type in watercolor painting and there's a plethora of community as you can join. You need help figuring out how to get around a healthcare denial, and there's a plethora of information that can help you. Honestly lemmy is not easy to use. Facebook YouTube Google Reddit etc are all very easy platforms for people who are not very computer literate to use. I don't think it's inherently lazy, more like inherently easy to use alternatives.
People need to change their ideas about what the fedi/threadiverse is in relation to social media. It is an international forum of everything.
The lemmy.ml situation is heavily offset by instances that either limit them or block them enitrely, as well as Piefed acting as a direct foil.
The *iverse cannot be unified entirely. Lemmy/Piefed/Mastodon and Pixelfed should be seen as a platform unto themselves where one may find likeminded people. It is not tailored to anyone's particular personal taste, and is open to anyone of literally any personal taste.
Lemmy does have a bit of a reputation for being the Fight Club of the fediverse... which is tbh, kinda fair but it kinda comes with the territory - literally. We're all here and we aren't all going to agree.
I would disagree with the everything part, but otherwise, that's precisely the problem - you can't expect the majority to drastically change their expectations of social media.
I don't expect the majority to do anything, but I also don't think Lemmy needs them to validate its existence. We validate it just fine already.
I would much rather more people enjoy it than us just keeping it to ourselves. I believe, if done properly, it has a decent amount to offer for the average user. The fediverse has the major advantage of being decentralized and open source, and I believe that should be accessible to everyone, not just the fanatics (like me, admittedly) who are ready to wade knee deep through technical details and differences in communities, some of them quite toxic.
But OK "we'll just keep it as is", we keep the fediverse for us. Yay?
Here's the problem with that: it then remains a niche. What happens to niches in technology? Well, there are a number of examples that I specifically would like the Fediverse not to follow.
Carrying around a replacement battery was never something most people did. They didn't generally replace their batteries, either. That was a niche thing. At some point, manufacturers started sealing their phones shut. After all, it was only a niche that needed replaceable batteries, so it didn't affect many people. So we lost a part of our right to repair.
Rooting your phone was never something a majority of people did. Look what is happening to people who root their phones (read: want admin rights on devices they bought and fucking paid for): they lose their warranties, they lose their ability to use banking apps without complex workarounds that don't always work, in some cases their hardware doesn't work properly. Because rooting is seen as a niche thing, "it doesn't affect that many people, so no need to worry". So we lost those rights. And we're about to lose the right to install whatever apps we fucking chose.
What's on the horizon? Age restrictions. Something major platforms may whine about a bit, but can implement just fine - they already don't really care about your privacy anyway, and if there are fines, generally they're small enough to just be a line item. The smaller platforms? The operators of lemmy.world? The operator of kbin.earth, my home instance? I highly doubt that they have anywhere near what's needed for that. But the fediverse is only a niche thing, so it doesn't affect that many people. Oh, shit, that's us now.
I believe Lemmy has the potential for a wider range of discussion and debate than Reddit, or any other social media platform I've been on, simply because of the defederated & community-based system. The issue, as you describe, seems to be saying the wrong thing in the wrong place, which, to be honest, is similar to the real world. There are a lot of topics people probably shouldn't talk about in public, but it's normally fine for them to talk about in their chosen groups/community. Lemmy just kind of brings these groups and communities closer together, igniting more discussion, but simultaneously causing issues you describe.
For example, you can't walk up to a group of homosexuals and try to convince them they shouldn't be gay. You can discuss topics related to LGBT+ rights of course, but there are definitely off-limit discussions in that group, same as any other group. I think it's a matter of paying attention to where you are in the Fediverse and who may be reading your response before blurting out what's on your mind.
On the comment about tessaract; I cannot agree on the idea that the dev of tessaract was "right" about toxicity. Even if he was, he was in no place to take it into his own hands to address (especially in a secretive way). Lemmy is a community-based platform and we need to figure that stuff out as a community. We don't have a corporate-level moderation team ensuring the platform is safe for those under 18, and we don't have anyone enforcing political views in any way other than in specific communities (who have every right to enforce their chosen views). Just as some say we wouldn't need police if we had strong communities, the same goes here, strong communities are the key. If you see a lot of toxicity where you browse, maybe your chosen community just isn't a healthy one.
In theory, I agree with you - and that was my very hope when I first got into the fediverse. Unfortunately, the reality has proven to be different...
Except it's much, much worse than in the real world. I've been in circles with right wingers, and I am notoriously stubborn about not hiding my viewpoint (which very often clashes with that of right wingers), and even there the reaction is less crazy than on Lemmy.
That's not the kind of thing I'm talking about. Of course something like that would go over like a lead balloon - in that case also because that's borderline in factual in its assumptions. A better comparison would be a conversation naturally wondering to the risks of anal sex if not done carefully and being chastised and banned for that.
I neither said nor implied that, in fact I said quite the opposite...
And that's exactly the problem. More work. More digging. More research. People come to these sites to have fun and often don't have the patience nor the interest to filter through all the communities.
I think we may just not view Lemmy in the same way. I don't see these sites as "fun". Sure there are funny memes, but it's also news and meta discussions about very recent topics. If I wanted to open something to have fun it'd probably be a video game or something.
Big tech makes it easy for people to use. They want the biggest and bestest userbases with the simplest interface... Lemmy does not care how big it is, it's all about organic growth, and Lemmy by itself doesn't have a very nice interface. I'd bet most people come here because they want to get away from the others, not because they want to add it to their list of feeds to browse. That being said, people making an effort to get away from the biggest and easiest platforms are probably more likely to put effort in to cater their feeds to their own interests and viewpoints.
Also I must've misunderstood your comment on Patrick originally so that's my bad.
There's no organic growth on Lemmy, the userbase was slowly shrinking since the APIcalypse. New users are largely those who were banned from Reddit.
Nah, you only think so because people who got here but weren't ready to put so much effort into switching left Lemmy in disappointment.
I believe in reality, the kneejerk reddit mod multiban just transitioned seamlessly into fediverse multibans and defederations - I know, who could've foreseen such shit. Some defederation happened for good reasons, but I've been cluster banned from a bunch of communities I never even been in as a "lemmy.world zionist", apparently, and that last bit is news to me at least. People bring their sad, incredibly petty bullshit with them.
People here are no fonder of "alternate viewpoints" than on reddit, you can tell the hivemind kicking in just from the person who pointed out a couple of blatantly realistic issues 8 seconds ago.
There's a difference between advocating for a "set the world on fire" attitude, and a "we must take up arms to defend our continued existence" attitude. I think we are well past the point where we should be pulling our punches on fascist ideology. Putting flowers in the gun barrels of the oppressors just means there'll be pollen on the bullets. I'd absolutely LOVE for there to be a peaceful solution*, but let's be real: we've seen this horror movie before. We know what's around that dark corner. I'd much rather go on the offensive and nip this shit in the bud.
(*and I hope there's still time to have one, let me be clear)
I don't remember the dragonfucker saga. What was that about?
There's an account that insisted people address them as that, because that was their username.
Then they had a handful of accounts named some version of "dragon" who they would borderline roleplay fuck in random communities.
It was really weird.
Like, no judgement if you're into that. The ick was they seemed to enjoy doing it in front of people to make them uncomfortable, and people that get off on violating consent like that, are going to be giant trolls about it. That account even created their own instance (pretty sure they ban anyone else that comments or creates an account) just so they could get onto the admin comms and cause drama.
Like, Ive hooked up with a woman who (at least at the time) claimed to honestly believe she was a dragon. So technically I'm a dragon fucker too, I just don't throw it in everyone's faces unless it comes up organically
I'm also very aware that she wasn't actually a dragon, and was most likely just trying to psych out of the military.
It wasn't only that - this person had come up with pronouns to match, almost like the attack helicopter meme that many found offensive, but unironically. People got banned for not using the dragon-whatever pronouns (and not just on this person's instances). And people started scanning other people's fediverse posts in order to pre-emptively ban people before they even posted in certain communities. It was wild.
I agree with you.
I sought out lemmy first during the reddit API closure saga. I started using it less when the quality started to decline to to corporatization and enshittification. Requiring logins to view content is the last straw that kicked me off reddit.
The most important lesson this move to lemmy has taught me: if we're being served trash content, we can't blame "the algorithm". The basis of the fault lies with the users. Lemmy has been absolutely no short of ragebait, engagement bait, group think, and crazies.
Speaking as a ln anarchist/council communist... There are some good instances and I simply don't see the bad ones if I'm on an instance acc with good defaults.
I don't view it as problematic if people are put off by Lemmy holding more normal, less capitalist and less reactionary views.
That said, in terms of preference, I'll pick free communist groups over tankies and liberals (I decline to ever consider fascists an option at all).
In these dark times I'm not quite sure whether we can afford to lose what allies we have. But we do need to mold what can be sympathetic to our progressive and left-wing causes.
Piefed is problematic for me - although it has a lot of modern features, I oppose the karma system there. I prefer a system that cannot be abused by bots.
I dont think the average lemmy user would want a bigger platform in general. They like the atmosphere as it is now and think of bullying people as their right.
More normies woudl chill the overall vibe but you'll start to see the rose tinters and what ever. Who knows what lemmy would morph into. Im sure capitalism will take its toll, even if its not integrated into the platform.
They instaban people who talk about Lemmy. It's useless.
I'm still not banned yet
I saw the modal pop up for that today, but it seems to only happen when I open a reddit link from search results
Move to the Lemmy or Piefed ASAP. At least then you not only have more freedom generally, eg. if you don't like one instance or vice-versa, you could move to another, but you can also host your own if you have the hardware and the admin chops for it.
For now you could still read Reddit with one of the few Redlib instances that are still active left, but even then it's a matter of time before that's blocked.
I killed my Reddit account the moment they announced they were going to be pushing more censorship last year and I haven't looked back. Figured that I might as well leave that sinking ship before I'm inevitably banned for something stupid on there, because had I stayed on Reddit, I would've been banned for some stupid made-up offense eventually. Basically, my reasoning boiled down to...
most of was forced out because they were purging a and shadowbanning like crazy. people thought there was no end to it, reddit only slowed down because they realize they were losing engagement to many actual users, and exposing more bots to take over the sites.
Let me be clear I've been IP banned from Reddit. It does not make any sense that they are IP banning anyone. Especially for nonsense like I evaded a ban in a community by logging in and commenting with a different login. (Which was accidental and not purposeful at all if they had a person look into what happened they would have seen that, AND my comments were really not even anything at all). Because why would you ban people who actively are using your site? If they are a company that makes money off of people engaging in the content of their site why would they ban them? Especially it seems like in the mass banning that's been happening. And I can understand banning one login if it creates an issue but to go into how they find out all of your logins and ban everything seems ridiculous. Especially if your business accounts are on there.
Nope, it's the best secret of the internet.
I'm getting this on the new UI too.
Maybe my browser finger print triggering something?
Enshittification continues :( There is also more advertising in other countries, so now r/all on old is increasingly flooded with different languages making it unusable.
Unfortunately, Lemmy still can't replace reddit. There are so many specialty subreddits that have no real chance of migrating. There is a split between (neo)liberal .world and communist .ml triad so there is no reasonable political discourse across the spectrum. Then there are instances that can go down any minutes requiring migrations that bleed users. Power tripping moderators.
Maybe there are technical solutions to some of this, maybe not. Like mirroring / "archiving" all specialty subreddits and their posts into lemmy communities. And maybe some way to migrate communities without losing posts and users. Or democratic systems for communities.
Lemmy is great for what it is, but people shouldn't delude themselves this is a replacement for reddit.
We can have those niche communities, but the problem is reaching out to the average user (who isn't in to tech) to join.
If, for example, some non-tech podcast decided to have a Lemmy community instead of a subreddit, then there would be a proportion people who join for that. But I imagine the numbers would be very low considering most shows also have other socials so many people would join the discord server instead. Also in this hypothetical, nothing stops someone from creating an unofficial subreddit which would likely become the popular one.
I dont want Lemmy.world to be a new reddit.
That's the beauty of the fediverse, your preference doesn't restrict others freedom. There are non-tech, non-Linux, non-political non-defaultSubreddit etc communities that currently only have a following on Reddit largely because the community is not "in the know" about Lemmy.
I still think it would be a better world if the majority of people used Lemmy instead of Reddit, Signal instead of Whatsapp, Mastodon instead of X etc, despite all the dipshittery that follows when the majority joins.
niche comms are a problem, they are all on reddit unfortunately, not enough people will join. also those subs dont suffer as much attrition as subs like news, politics, movies, sports,gossip based subs.