Plenty of oldschool message boards had strict moderation policies in place to keep things civil. One of the big ones which many subreddits are bad at enforcing(in part because of its size) is no trolling. Its a vague rule but its definitely a know it when you see it kind of thing and the trolls really do bring the whole site down.

Reddit often idealized and then abused the concept of "free speech" to the point where early on where the idea of banning subreddits like /r/jailbait and r/fatpeoplehate was controversial. The eventual banning of r/jailbait caused quite the stir back in the day. Then fascism started rising on the internet and again the cult of free speech allowed the people who's goal was to trample their own freedoms a platform to grown.

On some level I understand why freespeech was so sacred to the redditor. Reddit came it, replaced digg, got big, and then it's monolithic nature allowed them to kill off the messageboard ecosystem. On some level there was a fear of things going too far and there not being a way to replace their community. Some communities deserve the ban hammer, and some communities arent quite as appropriate for others.

I think the fact that lemmy is a federated site solves the issue that many would have had. So there's no nsfw beesgonewild subreddit for sexy pictures of bees. Thats ok because it's easy for someone to join or create an instance that caters to that kind of content. It's actually kind of toxic that the modern day internet wants every site to hold your attention and be everything.

For me it feels like the larger subs became unusable. Unless you caught a rising thread just at the right moment your comment would get drowned in a flood. Also the comments would be low effort and bad. Old reddit you'd go into the comments and someone would add more context or discussion to the link. Modern reddit it's an endless chain of people rushing to make low effort jokes.

Also reddit's free speech reddit lead to a very obnoxious type of troll dance around threads because "Im not breaking any rules I'm just having an intellectual debate!". Lemmy instances are more like old school message boards though. Saw a guy on lemmy.ml get a post deleted and a warning because he tried to say something disparaging about trans people, come back and be like "IM JUST DISAGREEING" and then he made another posts with screenshots trying to drum up outrage. This isnt reddit tho so he just got quietly banned.

Lemmy isnt trying to sell you anything, and it doesnt think free speech means you have the right to be an asshole and poop all over threads. It was refreshing to see them just taken care of.

I feel that, while lemmy is still a work in progress, it is already pretty adequate for solving this need. If you want to subscribe to other instances you can do it from within your insance by going up to communities and searching. You can also click the all tab and see a bunch of instances from around lemmy that your instance is federated with.

I think mastadon struggled with this because the twitter model is to follow people and depending how far removed the servers are this can be trickier. Compared to lemmy where people interested in a single subject will likely target and find the subject theyre interested in and bring themselves together naturally.

Furthermore I think some people are splitting up and dividing into sub instances and tiny subjects a little prematurely. Reddit didnt get super esoteric with it's subs until it got big and the larger subs either declined or got too noisy to talk about certain things. Like for example how beehaw has an operatingsystems instance instead of a linux, ubuntu, macos, windows, fedora, archinux, opensuse, openbsd, etc. Right now there arent enough of us that we dont need to subdivide.

This is the moment for lemmy. The big issue this system had was it's viability. It was tiny. Like you'd look around at dead instances proudly reporting their double digit monthly user count with several day old threads and no comments.

I know I've taken a look at lemmy for a few times and decided not to take the plunge because while I wanted a smaller alternative to reddit, it was too small. We're at a point now where things are active enough to draw in a stream of content and the snowball rolling downhill will eventually grow into an avalanche.

I dont think a federated open source reddit alternative is going to reach the hundreds of millions of users reddit got, but that doesnt matter. What matters is there's enough people around to sustain a decent community.

God I hope so. Discord works fine as a voice chat and groupchat for games. But it's insane to me that people use it as a replacement for message boards or websites and hosting files. It isnt indexed so you cant google it and a groupchat is a terrible format for this. Even as reddit dies you have some people acting like a glorified group chat is a good alternative. As an addition and supplement to a message board or website community sure this is how it's always been even in the old days there were boards with an active IRC chat. As the replacement? Awful.

Dont take this the wrong way but that kinda sucks. I dont want lemmy to be full of bot-fed reposts of reddit. I'd rather posts and engagement happen organically from users. Let the various instances and magazines grow their own communities and cultures. Already I see different sources being linked than typical on reddit, different kind of engagement.

If something is reposted from reddit I'd rather it be by an OP who actually cares about the subject and will be in the comments replying to people and carrying on a discussion

Even reddit wasn't this full of niche esoteric subs over night and a lot of that subdivision had to happen because the main subreddits got too big and full of noise. You can still try and foster discussion in larger instances with broader topics and likely get a few bites for discussion while the more niche stuff takes off.

It feels like this has been an issue for some time now with the internet ballooning in how resource heavy it is despite many websites not becoming all that more functional. It's the reason there is a meme of people being surprised that their browser tab is taking up so much ram. I mean yeah that news website may function similarly to how it did 10 years ago, but that tiny thumbnail is technically autoplaying a 1080p video, and despite being zoomed out in frame the photos uploaded in the background and thumbnails are also fairly large and high res even before you click on them, and there are countless other things running in the background that just arent worth it.

There was a period in the late 00s and early to mid 10s where the rise of the smart phones delayed this trend and forced developers to reconsider more minimal global experience. Flash was killed off and things got lighter weight and the new media rich features were better optimized for performance.

I think it's also not just that the developers tend to have better devices as much as it's a result of time and energy and resources put towards building software. Its similar to videogames. In the old days to save on resources a 2d game might use a single texture tile that could be mirrored, rotated, or color swapped so that precious ram space can be spared. Once the baseline or average hits a certain point(or a new console gen appears) a lot of that "optimization" goes away because it's not needed. Sometimes it's obvious and we're better for it like clouds no longer having to play double duty as bushes, but othertimes it means that we move onto something that technically looks marginally better but absolutely leaves a good chunk of contemporary hardware in the dust.

I think the most frustrating things about websites is that things arent that different for all the under the hood changes we get. Google maps is a lot slower in firefox than it used to be, and the android app uses more resources on mid range hardware than it used to(I'd know I remember using it on my HTC Dream/G1). Functionally I have been able to do the same things I can do now on google maps for probably more than a decade now. New technology has been introduced in the backend to make maps "better" but it is at the cost of CPU ticks and snappiness. Likewise a lot of news and article websites dont look that much different than they used to 10 years ago. Sure things are laid out differently and aesthetics change, but the navigation is fairly steady. But we have all this javascript and bandwidth sucking media autoloading and creating a slower experience. Even modern hardware can suffer from this.

50,000 people is a LOT of people. Keep in mind that a good chunk of the millions of users on reddit and other social media sites are either separated and isolated into smaller segments, or even then most people just lurk.

There needs to be specific standards clarifying what the rule actually is.

Hard disagree. one of the most annoying things about some reddit moderation is that people would play the "hey technically there isnt a specific point by point rule for the thing so you cant ban me!" and reddit culture was such that the jackass could then start subreddit drama over the power hungry mod "that banned me from being a loud obnoxious jerk, but technically the rules specify loud jerk, but not loud AND obnoxious".

This isnt your living room and I think as long as the mods and admins have a good head on their shoulders they should allowed to have a set of rules along with discretion for when some users need a timeout.

Redditors have no chill when it comes to minor stuff let alone this API debacle. It's going to be a dumpster fire and I cant see this going well.

It's good to see the subreddits fight a bit, but the internet of today is not the liquid ever changing space it was 10 or 15 years ago. Websites like reddit facebook and twitter are full on mainstream. Their userbase is huge many of which lurkers who dont pay attention or engage with a lot of the content.

Reddit especially is so compartmentalized that they helped kill off message boards and are essentially a series of small esoteric forums into themselves. At the end of the day there is a lot of value in being able to get pretty much any hobby and find a little active community for it and that really cant be replicated elsewhere. Much like how Facebook has been controversial for years the exodus did nothing because for a lot of people facebook is the internet. Twitter is a cesspool and even the mainstream is clowning on it, and yet it still lives and thrives.

There will be a bit of an exodus, but many of those people will likely begrudgingly go back home to reddit, and even for those that go away forever there are enough users that wont notice or care. Heck look at the new reddit/reddit mobile fiasco. A lot of noise and lots of "Im never going to use anything else". In spite of that you see tons of people with avatars and newreddit style profiles, and you see lots screenshots shared showing the official app and people outright surprised that there even are alternatives when they complain about it. Reddit is too big to fail.

That said enough people will leave and seek alternatives to finally kickstart alternatives in a serious way. I know Ive taken a look at lemmy in the past a few times but upon exploring found instances with double digit monthly user counts that were mostly dead. I dont mind a smaller site and in fact reddit got too big a long time ago, but it needs to be semi active and Im not interesting enough to do it myself. The threats alone have added quite a few users already.

Reddit wont die it will burn on, but the embers it sheds thanks to these events will finally ignite other alternatives.

Cooking up a platform for Free Thought And Expression! (NSFW &Loli/Shota/Cub friendly!) Minimal Restrictions on Content/Speech.

Hard pass on that dawg.

Good article. It really is kind of tragic that these people had to grow up in this kind of life. It really is chilling how someone born in the late 80s could have grown up to believe that they were essentially only there to give birth to lots of children to out populate them minorities and never work outside the home. To think that there are children in these kinds of home school situations today.

Even when done with good intentions and not as a means of indoctrinating their children it is a lot to school a child and more than the average parent can chew.

Well it was trained by the internet content so that tracks

Yeah lemmygrad will fade in popularity and lemmy.ml has already gotten so big it's shifted politically. It also seems like the creators are fine with other ideas on their instance too. Maybe it's just cause they know lemmy wouldnt get adopted otherwise but the only strict moderating against speech I see is against the obvious trolls and alt right fascists so far.

Then you have beehaw and the other instances outright blocking lemmygrad and things seem just peachy

If you're in the US a lot of public libraries connect with hoopla which you should be able to access for free with a library card. It gives you a set number of things you can "check out" a month depending on your library(usually around 5 or 6). This includes books, audiobooks, comics(single issues and volumes both count as a 1), and of course a week of some subscription services like nebula oddly enough. Worth checking out especially since nebula is more for independent creators to actually get paid and not big name media studio.

edit: Just double checked it isnt there. I feel like there was more last time I checked but I may have also just gotten confused with great courses plus and curiositystream which do seem to be there

Holy cow this is sad. I havent used RIF in probably a literal decade, but it was the first reddit app for android and I remember using it on my G1/htc dream back in the day. RIF predates a lot of the current era of the modern web and it existed even before the digsplosion. It's a relic of a different age and it's been growing and evolving this whole time.

I heard someone else put the issue with mastadon/twitter into words in a way that explained why I never jived with it. With mastadon/twitter you follow people and personalities while reddit and message boards were more about following a subject or interest. The twitter algorithm and sharing I guess spreads a lot of stuff around and it's cool that twitter has so many famous and inside industry people running stuff, but that community based on specific personalities makes it harder to follow.

If we want to give a daystrom answer I'd argue the reasoning for the inconsistent maneuverability is that targeting computers make it irrelevant in combat. You dont hear about a lot of misses in star trek and they're able to still hit their targets even when at warp speed. So the only time we really see these ships get cooking is if theyre skipping across an atmosphere, running away, or avoiding debris and asteroids.

I suspect there may also be some kind of tactical doctrine where federation ships are meant to hold their ground , give out some warnings, and take a few punches to the nose before going all out. Since they arent going to dodge a phaser anyway they might as well stand firm as a show of strength. Federation policy is very firm about starting a firefight so it's likely need to have the record be very clear that they arent aggressors.

From a meta point of view it's a practical matter of the models for the starships being genuinely big. It is not easy, especially on a 1980s tv budget to make that thing dance around so we got two ships staring each other down via view screen, some dialog about how far away they were, and then reactions of the crew being thrown around as they took hits. Again from a realistic and in universe perspective I think this works. Phasers are super precise, and thanks to shields these ships are tanks. They can dance around but when your that far away that barrel roll isnt going to make much of a difference. But it was clearly technical limitation. We got staredowns and that one shot of the enterprise slowly turning around and warping away.

Once CGI became more common in the mid to late 90s I think the opposite trend wound up happening. DS9 has clouds of federation ships that in theory should be sniping at each other from thousands of KM away charging into a dominion cloud. I think voyager wound up usually striking a better balance of old school staredowns with the occasional cool thing like coming out of warp right on top of someone and blasting them and tractoring another ship away. Enterprise also has quite a lot of maneuvering though the nx class is smaller than the other hero ships.