It’s been a long journey, but here we arrive. Welcome home.
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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!
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)
Yep, and that’s totally fair.
Are you saying there’s other reddit-like/inspired webservices that are part of the fediverse that aren’t Lemmy? What are those?
Currently kbin is the only one I am aware of.
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.
this is the future nerds like me have been imagining since the early 2000’s
Laughs in BBS
or
Laughs in Newgroups
damn baud rate
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/
And its newest form https://neopets.com/
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.
FidoNet :D
Yeah, lemmy does have a certain BBS/FidoNet vibe. Makes me nostalgic…
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 retro computer, you get a little dongle that appears 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.
ssh and/or telnet.
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.
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!!
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 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.
I completely agree with you, and your example is very good indeed. (Maybe my previous comment was not clear ? English is not my mothertongue)
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.
From an advertiser perspective it makes sense to sell to addicted people. Mission accomplished?
you don’t mention the copious, copious amounts of ads and sponsored contents
wow thanks reddit, you are more and more Facebook-like now, congratulations.
Yeah, that’s pretty bad too but I was at least willing to accept there is a valid reason for that to keep the lights on.
However, when they go as far to break the core functionality of the website and turn it into another Facebook with psychological manipulation at its core then that’s a whole other thing entirely.
Agreed. Honestly, if I want a FB-like Reddit, fuck that, I’ll going to Facebook.
Enshittification sucks I would say.
I hate the reddit app but I don’t have that problem. My home page is all what I’ve joined.
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>
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.
Funding, even in a not-for-profit sense, will always be an issue. Wikipedia struggles, but kinda makes it work. We’re going to need something creative for the fediverse…
that doesn’t really hold because Wikipedia does not struggle with funding in the sense you’re thinking: https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/wikipedia-millions-bank-beg/
so, survival doesn’t necessarily have to be at stake
I donate to them fairly regularly, Wikipedia is fucking great!
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
Oh sweet, sweet irony.
At least Ohanian is married to Serena, and left reddit 10 years ago. Spez (aka Steve Huffman) is a fucking piece of shit that betrayed both of his co-founders
Tbh, I totally forgot that Ohanian left Reddit like 10 years ago 🤦
They removed Aaron from the list of founders at some point.
You’re missing the precursors:
Email -> Newsgroups -> CGI forums / IRC -> Slashdot… :)
The new Fediverse really is kicking up IRC and newsgroup vibes for this old timer. Its very exciting.
As a really old person, I was thinking today the vibe was unlike anything I’ve felt since Fidonet ;)
Lots of similarities between Lemmy and FIDOnet. I’ve been saying this to anyone that will listen.
LORD
Lots of similarities between Lemmy and FIDOnet. I’ve been saying this to anyone that will listen.
If we’re including those then I think we have gone full circle and are back in the safe waters of protocols
I never really used email socially, was always a chat or some bulltin system
IRC is STILL running to this day
Yup, and some servers are very active.
I know something like 28 thousand active daily users!
+1 you’re right. Especially IRC…oh how I miss those days.
I miss that moment when I became the cool kid in the channel because I had an IRC bouncer
There are still some good communities out there. I’m still on IRC every day.
It’s about the only constant over internet use from 1994 to present. IRC and E-mail. Also the web kind of, but it’s changed so so much.
Usenet! Those were the days.
for me it was just
reddit --> Lemmy
You are here, so you are not late.
Unless you count a few random forums when I was a kid, same. You think we’ll age out before whatever war starts?
If you still have a Reddit account, unsub all the subreddits that are refusing to participate in a strike.
Fucking scabs
Good idea! Apparently most of my subs participated, so I only had to unsub a few times. Eerie view to see an empty front page after I was done, never had that.
Apart from this short visit, I stay away from reddit.
I’m kinda proud all the communities I follow followed suit! Even some pretty small/niche ones.
Damned good idea. I deleted all my posts and comments but also removing subs is good too.
What would that do? Not like they can pay the mods any less lol
Decrease soft power those subreddits have due to popularity/subscriber count.
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.
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.
A lot of instances block the tankie instance anyways.
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.
Matrix.org is cool too. I use Element.
Rexxit, lol thats brilliant
Trillian!! That’s a chain of neurons that’s been dormant for about 15 years…
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
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.
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.
Oekaki drawing boards ಥ╭╮ಥ Oh how I miss thee…
I made an irc client in MIRC using MIRC script before it had multi-server capability and thought I was so smart and then a few months later they released the update with it in it. Oh well, it was fun at the time!
YES! Gosh I miss irc.
Still remember my icq number lol.
Gosh icq… this thread is making me tear up a little with nostalgia
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
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.
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.
He did what now?
Who are the white supremacists he sold to?
It was the Chinese that he sold out to. Not the white supremacists.
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.
It is just the catalyst we need to transcend the status quo and normalize technology that respects its users.
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.
do birds fly? do ducks duck?
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
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.
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 “Technology@Beehaw.org” (p.s. I’m accessing this from Sopuli, so not on Beehaw).
I guess its just a natural progression of being absorbed by other communities that are larger. What I was getting at was a new feature that combines multiple communities into a single one on the backend and presents them as a single one (with interleaved posts/comments from all 5 communities or whatever)
I don’t know enough to truly be able to comment, but some others I’ve seen said that this creates a dozen problems to solve a signular one
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!
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)
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?
For me, Slashdot->Digg->Reddit->Kbin (Fediverse)
We’ve moved once, we can move again
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.
I think the difference here is that Digg and Reddit were both VC-driven companies that wanted power, and the fediverse is fundamentally different.
I was on reddit before digg, but left reddit for digg until diggv4, then I went back to reddit lol. The decentralized nature of Lemmy and the fediverse seems like it will be more resistant to that sort of bullshit though.
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 probably 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.
Such is life, nothing lasts forever. I could think of a good song for this, but nothing comes to mind yet as Im enjoying watching that Twitch counter of closed subreddits counting up nonstop.
“every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end”
Closing Time by Semisonic
Same fucking journey as you. Reddit was a good run for 10 years, let’s see if Lemmy can work.
Yeah, I almost did it, skipped digg. Seemed like a poor reddit clone at the time. Was nice to be on the right side, but sad to see it fall away. All for RSS, open source and federation though, so its nice. Reddit could have done the same - when they open sourced and allowed voat to be, they could have had a federated framework then - and allowed individual servers to handle their own APIs. They could have charged a license fee or something to commerical users who put ads on and made profits, but open source wins again I guess!
What do we do if it doesn’t? Just crawl back and apologize?
I don’t think so. Although many will remain with Reddit, there is no incentive or loyalty for a significant % to do so. If reddit is shit, why not just use FB, Twitter or regular message boards? Already I saw many subreddits have discords already.
The question for most of those useea is there a lesser evil in choosing one bad company over another? Unfortunately I just see this community content becoming fragmented as a result and no winners emerging.
I like Lemmy / kbin but I am concerned that a dev could just shutdown their server and a community, accounts are gone. Who pays the server bills, and maintenance backups etc. This seems incredibly problematic.
Beyond that they need a strong mobile app and 3P decs, a tool to read a users reddit profile and subscribe to similar channels, one click registration without selecting a server. It would be good to also have a mechanism for showing cross-platform posted content in a single view.
If honestly feels like the 90s wild west Internet days again. No alternative I have seen so far can address these concerns.
Discord is way too engaging
@collegefurtrader @Cobe98 I find it’s impossible to follow a conversation on Discord :(
Really depends on the size of the active user base, the quality of moderation and layout of the discord server.
I find while I have a bunch of larger discords that I’m not very active in them. The smaller discords are often where it’s at.
I mean, since there’s no central site to shut down, Lemmy failing would pretty much just mean that it stagnates and some of the bigger instances shut down, at which point there still would be some remnant of it left to stay on, if a smaller one. Failing that, it isn’t the only reddit alternative that people have been working on, so maybe one of the others will be more successful.
Exactly; if an instance goes down, then users can migrate to a new instance.
Consider exploring other Fediverse platforms before heading back to Reddit.
I’ve been using Mastodon for some time now so the Fediverse won’t lose me, the question is if my redditing can be migrated.
@OneRedFox @amki Yep. There’s #Kbin and #Lotide.
We make it work!
glares menacingly at Lemmy
Nah. If Lemmy/Fediverse doesn’t work out, there will be others. This has all happened before…
If the fediverse idea doesn’t work out and it’s yet another company the cycle is bound to continue.
A big chance is in front of us to break the cycle!
Oh, I agree wholeheartedly. Decentralization is the way to go and I hope Lemmy succeeds. This particular implementation may or may not work out long term, but the underlying idea is sound.
We’ll get it. Might take a couple tries, but we’ll get it.
