It’s been a long journey, but here we arrive. Welcome home.
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I skipped Fark, but my progression is largely the same. Once in a blue moon, I still visit Slashdot. It’s like checking up on an ex to see how they’re doing.
It’ll be great to see more people showing up on Lemmy.
People are so confused and overwhelmed about the fediverse mechanics though.
Maybe there is room for a product that is an aggregator for aggregators. Like, a centralised service that scrapes and collects all Lemmy instances into one super instance.
Its actually simple. Tell them, its like Email. You have an email account at gmail, but can perfectly fine have email conversation with someone on outllook. Lemmy instance = the same as a web email interface of any email provider. Most people will get their head around that.
As soon as you have to explain the fediverse to someone using analogies my experience is that most people have already given up. They just can’t be bothered to learn something new.
deleted by creator
For what it’s worth, there is an issue on staying on the same instance when clicking on a different instance’s community and dessalines agreed with the concept, so we might be seeing a change there soon.
Ohhhh I kept hearing the email analogy but never WHY it was like email. Thanks for the ELI5!
Great description. Im stealing that one
I don’t think such an aggregator is required. Interoperability is smooth enough that you don’t have to think about different instances most of the time. I’ve only really noticed two points that would be confusing:
- the sign up process
- the “local”/“all” distinction
So I think what we really need to do to make this platform intuitive to people that aren’t already familiar with it is:
- Somehow streamline signing up. The process from googling Lemmy to having an account on an instance should not be confusing or intimidating.
- Filter by “all” by default. The default should cater to the users which are less likely to figure it out themselves. If you don’t understand what instances are and what “local” vs “all” means, then you are probably here for the “all” experience. If you understand and really want “local” you are probably fine having to set it yourself.
The all for default is actually an admin setting (for users not signed up)
Pardon my confusion since I’m new to the fediverse as well, but isn’t every Lemmy instance like the super instance you are describing? You can access any community on any instance from any other; there are commentors in this thread from beehaw.org, lemmy.world, lemmy.sdf.org, programming.dev, and many others.
Nah those are like sibling instances. I’m talking about a parent instance that combines all the children instances with a new community that aggregates multiple remote communities.
Just thinking out loud, haven’t really fleshed out the idea yet.
Yeah, I think I get it - there’s a bunch of smaller gaming@<lemmy-instance> kind of things, you’re talking about a master c/gaming that combines all of the smaller lemmy instances of gaming channels, right?
Yeah, like multireddits!
That already exists. ATM, the thing you’re confusing it with is that there are 4-5 “gaming” subs, but eventually if one gets big enough or the others get taken in by one this will happen, and it’ll look like this instance “[email protected]” (p.s. I’m accessing this from Sopuli, so not on Beehaw).
From what I know, the instances share the posts between each other, but they need to have had contact with another instance somehow before they can get posts from there. Something like a user searching for an instance that isn’t yet known to their “home” instance yet or following a link to it.
As I understood it, this lets the instances know of each other. Posts of unknown instances won’t show up on your instance until the connection has been made.
So maybe a super instance could somehow include a newly created instance as soon as it has connected with any other instance already in the super instance.(might not be too coherent since I know little about this all as of now ^^)
Wouldn’t the home instance already have to know about the remote instance in some way for it to show up in that initial user’s search?
That would be https://lemmy.directory
OMG the “All” on that thing is about as useless as Mastodon"s “All”. Crap flying by so fast you can’t read it.
Don’t look by new?
Renegade BBSes -> IRC -> slashdot -> digg -> reddit -> imgur -> discord -> mastadon -> lemmy
with plenty of side quests along the wayPre search engine time on Geocities trading mutual linking on each other websites, reams and reams of messages and emails
So we’re a side quest then?
It’s hard to tell… it doesn’t feel like one, but it remains to be seen.
But I feel like the other alternatives to Reddit and the fediverse are more of a sidequest at this point.
I realise that this is unpopular. But personally while I disagree with the decision to charge (exorbitantly) for the api and appalled at the slander hurled at the dev, I think that is an business choice and one more item that I have to disagree and live with.
But I am very excited about the rise of the fediverse. I know that a company will eventually make a decision that I feel very passionately about, but I will be stuck making a difficult choice. With the fediverse, it provides the users with the opportunity to have control. This power of course often comes with various other costs (lack of a dedicated sre or moderation teams, etc). But I expect that over time this will evolve into options where paid offerings will come up that allows for higher QoS where required.
Honestly, if spez hadn’t already sold the site to white supremacists, I’d be a lot quicker to defend this.
Who are the white supremacists he sold to?
It was the Chinese that he sold out to. Not the white supremacists.
The api changes really were about protecting their gold mine of data from ai data models scraping for data. Reddit wants to use that data to create its own models and then replace moderators with those models. The ultimate goal here is to turn the existing dataset into an automoderator on steroids that they could sell anywhere. Trouble is someone else is going to beat them to it.
There was a reason these changes lined up so nicely with Google doing the same thing. Everyone’s realizing they’ve been spouting their gold from firehoses for any machine to pick up, and they’re being reactionary and turning them off asap instead of just like, accepting it as a facet of having a public social network.
I’m also very optimistic right now. The challenges I see are more around funding, as continued work on the code bases and hosting seem to be the largest hurdles and ultimately easier with money than without. The Fediverse feels like an incredibly natural next step for a lot of users that are coming from a Reddit or Reddit-like background. Everything else (robust collection of communities, moderation, 3rd party tooling, etc) comes with the crowd and from the community, not from the “owner”, and will only take time if we can solve for the funding/scaling challenges.
Gonna be honest it’s kinda weird to me as someone who did just move over that there’s a bunch of posts from people who just found the Fediverse claiming it as home while there’s people who have been here since it’s creation. It’s got the implication that this was created as some sort of next jump from Reddit which doesn’t really seem to be the case from my perspective.
I bet some early Redditors felt the same way about the Digg refugees.
That feeling makes sense, but I think everyone knows that the Fediverse wasn’t created specifically to give them a landing in this event, just like Reddit wasn’t created to catch the Digg refugees, etc. More of a “next phase in the evolution of this concept”, and while it took a catastrophe, they’re ready to consider that it’s time to move on now.
The trick is going to be walking that line between preserving what made the Fediverse great and not alienating the newcomers. I think there’s room for everyone, though, and really the big advantage of the Fediverse - we don’t have to agree to co-exist, and can even co-existing completely separately if needed.
I think you bring up a pretty important point about federation in that it allows for and even encourages expansion in some ways, so that’s a good way to keep optimistic about it. I guess I just feel a little embarrassed. Especially when you look at posts like the recent one asking Lemmy users how they feel about the reddit refugees, and it’s flooded with responses from Reddit refugees instead offering unsolicited feedback about design choices. Then you have threads like this with people laying claim to the fediverse more or less. It just feels like some kind of a Christopher Columbus situation. While I realize that might be a little tone-deaf it’s the best analogy I have for it.
Any community is a sum of it’s members, good bad, or otherwise. I think there will be a wave of us Reddit refugees, but also word is going to spread to other places like Meta and hopefully bring in even more people. Getting people sorted into servers that are going to be able to handle the load, or even better getting them to host their own servers is going to be the way to go. Sorry if we’re stumbling all over your garden in the meantime.
Getting people sorted into servers that are going to be able to handle the load, or even better getting them to host their own servers is going to be the way to go.
That part still worries me a smidge, and it’s somewhat related to my other concern about funding/scaling. As more of the general public discover and move over, the % of the general population willing and able to host their own instance is going to steadily decrease. Not saying that we’re all gonna die or anything, but it’s going to be a shift and we’ll have to continue to adapt.
Hmm. Theoretically you could commercialise an instance, I guess.
I expect that in time, that’s exactly what will happen. Some instance somewhere will offer guaranteed availability and performance for a monthly fee to it’s members. That feels icky at first blush, but why should it? It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but no one is forced to use that instance to be part of the larger community, and one instance can’t hold the community hostage like a single company social media company could. They’ll have success right up until they don’t and the Fediverse will sort it out through migrations of users and communities.
or make a non-profit. archiveofourown have ~20% of reddit’s traffic and run purely on donation.
That might work too, but I feel like it could be tricky to fundraise if there’s 1000 equivalent large-ish instances.
kind of a Christopher Columbus situation. While I realize that might be a little tone-deaf it’s the best analogy I have for it.
I definitely get the sentiment. Everyone is looking for how to make this what they “need” (want) without enough consideration for what it already is and who got it there. It’s going to be a journey, that’s for sure.
I see what you mean to an extent, and I also just moved over, but it’s worth remembering that Digg -> Reddit was the same afaik. Like Reddit had been around and established for a decent amount of time before the fall of Digg. (This is second-hand info because I wasn’t around at the time)
I’ve been on reddit for a couple years before the flood from Digg. The quality of content and especially comments went down right then, and never recovered.
Personally I skipped Digg entirely.
Depends entirely on the subreddit, in my experience. Places like AskHistorians didn’t even exist when the great Digg exodus occurred. My favorite sub was /r/cfb which also benefited greatly from the mainstream popularity.
Not coincidental that both of these are relatively strongly moderated compared to many of the biggest/default subs.
I had the same journey but I’m pretty sure I found Slashdot by way of boingboing which I found by way of Diesel Sweeties blog posts when I first got a DSL connection in 2002 and was looking for comics and blogs to fill up my trendy new RSS reader lol
Lame. You weren’t even on Usenet in the 90’s.
- Signed, Zoomer.
I am old enough to not care what people on the internet think which is why I posted this, I am battle hardened
We you even on FidoNet?
for me it was just
reddit --> Lemmy
You are here, so you are not late.
The Fediverse seems like an interesting idea, but I hope it actually holds together.
The bar for being Reddit circa 2010 isn’t that high to be fair, I know expectations have changed but Reddit was down intermittently for years to the point I’m amazed it got the traction it did in hindsight. People talk about Lemmy having tankies on it as though early Reddit didn’t have some even worse unsavoury subs and users too.
A lot of instances block the tankie instance anyways.
No kidding, wasn’t r/jailbait the biggest sub for a while there?
There were and are to this day a ton of subs with similar content.
I imagine as Mastodon and Lemmy pick up more users, we’ll see a lot of activity and improvements in the underlying tech of the fediverse. Should be a fun ride, especially since it’s in the hands of the community.
Let’s see if the technology can improve fast enough to retain users.
idk, I think it’s there already. I’m already having enough content to engage with and post comments.
Sure, I can’t scroll through new content endlessly, but there’s enough to replace Reddit.
I might actually make posts here, too, since it’s likely to gain traction. On Reddit, there were only a select few smaller subs I’d generally post to, and even then, only rarely.
I mean even Reddit wasn’t really “endless” for me. On particularly boring days I could definitely reach the end of content that interests me.
Let people on other platforms know that we exist! Lol
So many long forgotten relics and old friends lost to time.
bbs, usenet, irc, aol chat rooms, aim/icq/msn messenger (by the way, anyone remember Trillian?), geocities web-rings, various phpBB forums (shoutout neopages), oekaki drawing boards, livejournal, stumbleupon,
Trillian! I paid for the multi-messenger functionality too!
IRC is not dead. Since rexxit began I have started really searching for programming/data science/tech communities. I have found more than I know what to do with and many have an IRC. I just installed Pidgin on one of my Linix machines. Ha! What a time to be alive.
Rexxit, lol thats brilliant
Yeah some of those I had forgotten! For me it was usenet, IRC, ICQ, Yahoo Chat Rooms (I was one of the kids that dropped booters and other pesky little bots and hacks into them all the time 😂 - I’m still friends to this day with someone I met via Yahoo Chatrooms though!) Definitely used Trillian, and the old phpBB forums before I found Reddit over 10 years ago…and now Lemmy
Trillian!! That’s a chain of neurons that’s been dormant for about 15 years…
by the way, anyone remember Trillian?
I never used it, but I did use similar things like Kopete and Pidgin. Both of those still exist and are still maintained, by the way, albeit far less useful now that the big four instant messaging systems are gone. Of those four, only ICQ still exists, and I doubt it still uses the same protocol, seeing as the old one wasn’t encrypted.
IRC thrives! The dusty corners of the internet where people continue to develop the most obscure software functioning as an unknown pillar of the internet still have IRC channels available to discuss and interact.
Still remember my icq number lol.
Same. I logged in to their icq web client recently for shits. Was a trip to see all the old usernames.
You mean to tell me ICQ is still online after all these years?!
Yeah. You can dismiss the phone number thing, and log in with your icq number and password
Digg -> Reddit -> Lemmy
After experiencing the death of two “power to the people” platforms due to profit-driven VC-backed corporate meddling, here’s hoping the third platform is the charm Lemmy & the fediverse.
I don’t think the Fediverse will suffer the same demise as Digg and Reddit, precisely because it’s not owned by a profit-driven VC-backed corporation, but there are a couple of other serious threats to its longevity:
- Moderation. If the Fediverse isn’t adequately moderated, it will quickly be overrun by Nazis, pedos, and spam. That’s what killed Voat and Usenet.
- Funding. This isn’t like IRC, where a modern server can support tens of thousands of users in its sleep. Running a system along the lines of Reddit or Twitter requires a lot of computing power, and that’s expensive. Where’s the money going to come from?
I think smaller instances of a maximum of 1-2000 people are the way to go for the future. Most instance owners are hosting it because they want to and they have a lil extra cash to throw at it, the 500-2000 people instances are usually funded by the likes of a patreon ko.fi or other donation setup.
These instances aren’t big enough that the cost is of an instance isn’t massive and can therefore avoid the likes of Venture capital and Angel investors, and if they start to reach the level where funding is getting a bit short even with donations, they can close new account creation untill the number of donators increases beyond a point
TL;DR: Essentially instances should be welcoming new accounts in waves. So that their growth doesn’t outpace donation income.
It’s funny to read this article about the death of Digg again:
In reality, Digg changed their business model and pretended that they didn’t. That is something that is unacceptable with communities and won’t be forgotten. Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian hit the nail on the head in an open letter to (now former) Digg CEO – Kevin Rose:
“You chose to grow with venture capital and you’ve no doubt (I hope) taken some money off the table in your Series C round. I say this because this new version of digg reeks of VC meddling. It’s cobbling together features from more popular sites and departing from the core of digg, which was to “give the power back to the people.”https://searchengineland.com/digg-v4-how-to-successfully-kill-a-community-50450>
Oh sweet, sweet irony.
Sadly, this is the only logical conclusion of things that are run for profit. Here’s hoping the federated model proves more resistant in the long run.
Doctorow has it right. Enshittification.
In the medium run federated instances will have to be financed somehow as well. We’ll see how that goes.
Depends on how many volunteers you have who are actually willing to donate
Where does somethingawful fit in
Eating popcorn watching goons, dey scury
Tried the official Reddit app today and boy people weren’t joking when they say it sucks. I thought it’d just be the usual experience plus some ads but I was totally wrong.
The official app doesn’t respect your subreddit subscriptions at all, instead force feeding you feeds of whatever their algorithm thinks will drive maximum engagement just like a shit version of Facebook. The “hot” etc functionality is completely stipped from it entirely.
Guess I’m here to stay on the fediverse now.
What absolutely sucks about this is that I had carefully curated my subscriptions on RIF in order not to exacerbate my dumb mental health issues.
Hell, I’ve read angry posts about people in recovery from addiction and alcohol saying how they keep seeing ads for beer or gambling and things like that.
It’s horrifying!!
The algorithm really doesn’t work when you are critical or sceptical over a subject. For instance crypto sceptics from r/buttcoin being shown binance ads. Yes, they do show an interest in crypto, but may be the least suceptible persons to that ad.
It’s different with subs focused on addiction & recovery though.
Maybe it’s a very bad idea to targeted knife ads in a suicide watch sub, you know? Susceptible people and all.
people in recovery from addiction and alcohol saying how they keep seeing ads for beer or gambling
Not that this is how it works, but I imagine a diligent algorithm looking at those individuals and that content, and then thinking “mhhmm this will generate maximum revenue!!”.
I think that’s absolutely how it works (in part). Ads curated toward your demographic! Maybe it’s not inherently purposeful, but it’s harmful, nonetheless.
In a subr×ddit about alcohol recovery? “Our algorithm detected that your post history contains the word “alcohol” or “beer” a lot! We will tailor your ads to cater to your interests for maximum profits!” Boom. There you go.
It takes the human aspect out of the community and drives it to become harmful at worst and soulless at best.
Even more than that, you have the idea that ‘similar users to yourself buy a lot of alcohol, so you probably will too’. Of course alcoholics, whether attempting recovery or not, are likely to buy alcohol. So if you’re a recovering alcoholic, ‘similar users to yourself’ are gonna be buying more alcohol than usual, and so you’ll see ads for it. Totally heartless and just for-profit.
Me too. I suffer from PTSD myself so I avoid things like the war coverage in Ukraine. The app is full of it and I can’t filter it fully like I can in RIF.
The one true constant for me is 4chan 😅
I kinda grew out of it. It was funny when I was an edgy teenager but it got progressively more cringeworthy as time progressed for me, even though the content may not have changed much.
I stopped engaging with Reddit when meme-ification happened.Wheb it became all about the lolz abd short pithy responses, I started using it to find more interesting articles. Gone are the days wheb the average Redditor would read and make thoughtful contributions.
That is in part because the reddit algorithm doesn’t like thoughtful contributions. These take time and understanding of the discussed matter. When your metric is positive (upvote) interaction per timeframe you need easily digestable content that people immediately react to. If I have to carefully read and think about the content my vote/comment is far too late to be “hot” on reddit.
Yeah that’s basically it. Bots had overtaken Reddit too and just propagated that problem by re-posting posts/top comments.
That depended on the subs you were in IMO, there was a lot of that but there were others that still had worthwhile stuff that wasn’t just silly shitposting for fun. Now we’ve got Lemmy though and multiple instances of it!
I used 4chan when I was younger but trying to go back after reddit was super depressing, I lasted about 5 minutes.
I stopped using 4chan when the probability of getting goddamn CP snuff videos in the browser cache because of a /b/ raid got beyond trivial, so like pretty fucking early on.
4chan definitely got worse. like it was always edgy and stupid, but after 2015 every board just kind of became /pol/
Yeah, nazis kinda ruined it. pre-2010 it was more whimsical and ridiculous as opposed to cringey and unironically bigoted.
I think even calling it Lemmy is not the right move. Yeah, Lemmy is the server software running on a bunch of instances. But we also have kbin, and new softwares will pop up and fork and come and go over time. Once we can do some kind of account or community level migration, it won’t matter whether you are on Lemmy or kbin or the next great thing. Everything will be federated so it will inter-op beautifully. If an unfriendly instance admin comes along, we can collectively cut and run with minimal interruption.
Thats still a way off from where we are now but the hard step was getting to the Fediverse in the first place. So, welcome to the newcomers among us.
I think the concept of the Fediverse is still really alien to people, even the people who are using it. Everyone is still so used to their centralized platforms, so they still think of the Fediverse in terms of platforms rather than as a whole.
You still hear people say “Mastodon” to mean the microblogging corner of the Fediverse even if they’re not actually on Mastodon, and now people say “Lemmy” to mean the link aggregation corner of the Fediverse even if not everyone is actually on Lemmy.
I recently found and like the term “threadiverse” for reddit-like federated software
I really like that, I’m gonna do my part to spread it!
Are you saying there’s other reddit-like/inspired webservices that are part of the fediverse that aren’t Lemmy? What are those?
Kbin already exists, and a decent portion of people are switching over. It’s still early days though, so it remains to be seen how it all plays out.
Currently kbin is the only one I am aware of.
Maybe this is an unpopular opinion but the word “Fediverse” leaves a sour taste in my mount just because it sounds so much like the stupidity that was “Metaverse” (yes I know they are completely unrelated)
this is the future nerds like me have been imagining since the early 2000’s
Laughs in BBS
or
Laughs in Newgroups
Web Rings. Remember those?
They’re making a comeback, somehow: https://webring.xxiivv.com/
Oh, I love this.
Throwing this in the “fun retro internet” pile alongside https://neocities.org/
Neocities has been around for years now… I have a website there… I do wonder if it’s getting bigger though.
Seems like every old school platform is getting some sort of resurgence these days, and honestly it’s understandable - the collapse of modern social media has created a wave of nostalgia for the good old days of the dot com era.
And its newest form https://neopets.com/
FidoNet :D
Yeah, lemmy does have a certain BBS/FidoNet vibe. Makes me nostalgic…
damn baud rate
I still use both. 99% of Usenet is spam, but there still a few active groups (especially under comp.*). The BBS scene on the other hand, is booming. I see new users every week on my favourite board.
How does a current day BBS work? Landline phone connections are a thing of the past here.
telnet or ssh (usually telnet)
If you’re connecting from a modern computer, you just get a telnet client that does the appropriate code pages/ANSI/zmodem/etc. If you’re connecting from a real vintage computer, you get a little dongle that pretends to be a modem (and often accepts AT commands, including fake phone numbers), but secretly connects to WiFi and relays through a telnet connection.
Some BBSes do still have landlines, and there’s the occasional ham radio BBS, but 99.999% of it is through IP-based telnet or ssh these days.
Are they doing BBS-over-SSH these days, or do you need a dial-up modem to participate?
Sadly most people CAN’T connect through dial-up, even if both parties have all the equipment. A lot of telcos have redone their entire network in VoIP stuff (with heavy compression) which makes it hard to keep a connection even at 300.
ISPs degrading the performance of other ISPs? That sounds rather anticompetitive…
undefined> calling it Lemmy is not the right move.
Spankin’ new here, so what do I know, but while the semantics might not be completely accurate, that is not an uncommon occurrence. And Lemmy sounds personal, with a bit of a Motorhead edge to it.
Maybe we’ll all be called Lemmies web slinging in the Fediverse one day.
Yup, having a name is a pretty important aspect of growth. And while the fediverse could certainly work, it’s not very intuitive for new users and also covers such a broad range of functionalities that it won’t help people who are specifically looking for a Reddit alternative. Sure ‘lemmy’ is a misnomer, but it’s better to have a name being used incorrectly than no name at all.
