I run a few groups, like @fediversenews@venera.social, mostly on Friendica. It’s okay, but Friendica resembles Facebook Groups more than Reddit. I also like the moderation options that Lemmy has.
Currently, I’m testing jerboa, which is an Android client for Lemmy. It’s in alpha, has a few hiccups, but it’s coming along nicely.
Personally, I hope the #RedditMigration spurs adoption of more Fediverse server software. And I hope Mastodon users continue to interact with Lemmy and Kbin.
All that said, as a mod of a Reddit community (r/Sizz) I somewhat regret giving Reddit all that content. They have nerve charging so much for API access!
Hopefully, we can build a better version of social media that focuses on protocols, not platforms.
In general, it works pretty nice, but there are some limitations.
The biggest one for me is discoverability. The federation means that there is more fragmentation and it’s harder to find the right community for something.
For example, there are country/city communities for my country/city on multiple instances. And since it’s hard to find the “correct” one, it fragments out much harder than Reddit did. Combine that with generally lower attendance numbers and you get really tiny communities.
This is not aided by Jerboa, which doesn’t open internal links internally. So if someone posts a link to a community and I press it, it instead tries to open it with my email app.
Finding “the right community” is definitely an issue, and I’m sure will continue to be one for a while. But remember Reddit had the same issue, with multiple redundant subreddits when one would have been better.
I’m sure things will consolidate over time, with less popular communities going quiet and their subscribers moving to more active ones.
That is true, that was an issue on Reddit as well. But here it’s even worse, since you can have a community with the same name on different instances. It basically adds another dimension to the discoverability issue.
It’s true, but I guess it’s the price of federation. And Reddit having a single namespace meant a lot of subreddits needed to have “real” or “true” prefixed to their names, which was pretty confusing.
It’s ugly, difficult to understand, And the search function is fucked. All in all, it’s pretty crap and I miss reddit a great deal. That said, I’m never going back. I just wish lemmy was better.
Honestly, I kind of hate it, but since Reddit is unusable, considering all the subs that have gone dark (presumably permanently).
I’ll be honest. I don’t like the Fediverse concept - the fatal flaw of decentralized systems is that sometimes centralized systems are great. Basically, reddit was ONE BBS style forum for everything, which was the killer convenience. Similarly Twitter was the ONE microblogging platform for everybody, which was the killer convenience.
Because the moment anybody can operate a service, everyone does.
Right now, I need to buy a car, I can’t find a good Lemmy community to get advice from. Searching for ‘cars’ in all federated communities returns:
Leave aside for a moment that “Fuck Cars” has 34x more subscribers than the biggest Cars community - there are two different “Fuck Cars” communities, and three different “Cars” communities. It’s great that you have subscriber numbers, but there’s no definitive place to find out information on cars. Reddit’s CEO is right that Reddit was organized like a landed-gentry where a first-come-first-serve approach to the most popular forums was done, but that landed-gentry system solved this problem, whatever new problems it may have introduced.
Now, you could look for a technological solution to solve this problem: For example, you could have a centralized server for all federated Lemmies, some sort of “lemmyhub.com”
We’d all have to agree on it. People could set up alternatives, but we’d all have to basically coalesce and say: Yes, this is the thing we want. Maybe it’d use blockchain, I don’t know. Point is, it’s centralized and easy to find information. It would work “just like Reddit” where you would have ONE authentication/authorization that works seamlessly across all instances (the current system is anything but seamless), and there would be ONE key/value combo for keyword. So, instead of going to Cars@lemmy.ml & Cars@lemmygrad.ml & Cars & lemmy.world, you just go to cars.lemmyhub.com.
If you want to post, you just use your lemmyhub account and your post appears on the “default” community. You can still post on individual lemmies by going to the individual lemmy page as well, or by specifying which of your Lemmy instance accounts you want to post as.
Here’s the problem with the merging all the cars communities together, though: There is nothing to prevent someone from creating Cars@NeoNaziHeartsFascism.com and spamming the community with bile or trolling. Lemmyhub could operate a blocklist for troll and hate communities and instances, but once you’re doing that, you’re making editorial decisions. And forget all the nasty ethics problems around “what’s free speech/what’s hate speech?” “what’s acceptable to view/what’s not?”, you have legal liability problems if anything slips through the cracks.
Reddit wasn’t perfect, and certainly they could have been more proactive with shutting down hate speech, and more speedy with shutting down illegal content, but by and large reddit worked. Reddit’s authoritarian approach worked because it was mostly benevolent – right up until the point that it wasn’t.
So I don’t think Lemmy can technologically make it’s way out of the situation.
I think what needs to happen is a solution like the Wikipedia foundation; we establish a non-profit designed to create a centralized server which may choose or not choose to incorporate Lemmy instances. It runs on donations, not advertising, and it’s not designed to maximize profit, only to keep the servers running. It would borrow heavily from the Wikipedia model in organization and structure.
Because I’ll be honest - Lemmy and Mastodon are okay, but there’s really nothing in them improving on the old Newsgroups system of the late 80s and 1990s. Reddit captured the market for forum discussions because it was simply a better solution, there’s nothing in Lemmy that makes it better - for the user - than Reddit.
Should we then abandon Lemmy and go back to Reddit? No, of course not. Reddit, if anything shows us that eventually all authoritarian systems, no matter how benevolent they start, always eventually turn tyrannical, and can do so on a whim, and once they do so, it is impossible to get back to benevolence.
But I’ve been a redditor for 15 years - I predated subreddits, if you can believe that. And I’m not finding the things I used to go to Reddit for here on Lemmy - information, expert and informed discussion, and niche topics. Maybe that’s an adoption problem that will be solved with scale (and I hope it is), but right now, I feel like my luxury Bently sedan got totaled and I’m driving a 20 year old Honda Civic with manual transmission. By all means I’m grateful for the tent, but I still miss my Bentley
I like it - I just want a few Reddit-ish features:
Hiding reply chains for scrolling cleanliness in comments of a post
Hiding posts on the main page should be easy to do (buttons unclear)
Dedicated copy link button - so it’s clear I’m copying the link to the page that is being spoken about in a post, rather than a link to the comments of the post itself.
(1.) should already be here, at least - on the web version it’s the [-] icon next the commenter’s name, and on Jerboa you just tap the top bar of the comment. Agree that there should be a way to hide posts permanently - it’s kind of annoying to always scroll past the same pinned posts at the top of the “Local” view.
I love it. I love how I don’t usually have to deal with “right-wing” extremists. They’re usually contained to lemmy.grab, but I suppose one or two might break containment every now and then.
Still, a hell of lot better then seeing their bullshit as the first comment on a new post. :|
I’m still trying to get my head above water, but I’ve learned enough to start being able to browse and post. I still haven’t found the instance I want to use as a home instance, and don’t know how to browse instances other than the one i’m on. But these things come in time, and im willing to learn.
Used Reddit for 13 years, tried out Kbin and Lemmy yesterday and settled on Lemmy.
Long story short, I’m going back to Reddit.
There needs to be ONE site, Lemmy.com, that people goto. This entire thing about having .whateveryouwant is VERY off putting. Most internet users have been trained to be extremely wary of odd or unusual things, so having anything besides .com/.net/.org will turn away a huge portion of users.
I initially setup an account on Lemmy.world, then realized that I couldn’t migrate it to another server and that when I deleted that account on that server all my comments were deleted.
Deciphering the distributed nature of it took me, a relatively tech-friendly person, almost the entire day and several ‘What the fuck?’ posts. I now understand it more. There are some very low-level guides that have been haphazardly put together, but there absolutely needs to be a MUCH smoother guide/explanation to this whole thing. That learning process will turn people away for sure.
BECAUSE I understand it more now, I’m left feeling VERY uncomfortable about my data security. If this is going to become a mainstream thing, as it reaches and before it gets to that critical mass of users, there’s going to be SO. MANY. SECURITY ISSUES. There’s no 2fa at all, hacking and user-account hacking is just going to run rampant, and I’m left wondering ‘Where is my username and password actually stored?’. The answer, sadly, is wherever the dude who’s running the instance/server is. In the ‘Fediverse’ your server instance might be hosted in a US or EU data center with proper digital and physical security, or it could be Joe Blows basement in Iowa running off a NAS. The easy-to-see future here is that Lemmy will fail to attract a critical mass of people because they’ll initially arrive, after a few months their instances will just cease to exist/get shut down/the hosts will decide its no longer a fun hobby to do.
With a large corporation, they have the staff and resources to secure and maintain the servers physically and digitally, and keep staff up-to-date on current infosec threats and get out in front of them. Beyond that, if there IS a breach, they have the ability to recognize it, understand the legalities and requirements of reporting it, and can be held accountable by regulatory bodies. Joe doesn’t have the resources to really maintain and keep a server running, nor the knowledge of his responsibilities for keeping the data safe digitally or physically.
On top of that, if Joe’s basement loses power/gets hacked/Joe decides he’s moving to San Fransisco and can’t bring his NAS with him and the server goes down, and that’s where my instance is hosted well there goes my entire account/comments/data.
Finding and subbing to communities is painfully difficult. It should be one-click, but somewhere I need to goto an external list, find what I want, and then copy/paste the URL into the search… and then 50% of the time, it doesn’t work. This is an understandable growing pain and can likely be fixed by UI/UX upgrades, but for now it’s a definite turn-off.
There simply is no content. I’m not a creator, I want content aggregated for me, and I’ve gotten used to having a single place to get it from that floods me with thousands of different articles/memes/posts/etc every minute. Until the user base arrives in one single place and starts generating content, there’s no reason for most people like me to be there as by far the larger number of users never create anything at all and only exist to consume the content generated.
Sorry, but a lot of your concerns you outline, I just don’t agree with.
There needs to be ONE site, Lemmy.com, that people goto.
No… Reddit’s singular biggest issue is the fact that everyone is beholden to Reddit’s whim. Leaving any of this to any singular company/persons whims is a big problem. Moderator banned you from a subreddit cause they powertrip? What’s your recourse? You have none.
This entire thing about having .whateveryouwant is VERY off putting.
And yet emails are not a problem. Why specifically is this off putting? You’ve never emailed anyone outside of gmail.com? or outlook.com?
Most internet users have been trained to be extremely wary of odd or unusual things, so having anything besides .com/.net/.org will turn away a huge portion of users.
Statistically this is very wrong. Quite the opposite in fact. Users are terrible at identifying ANYTHING malicious as actually being “Wrong”.
I initially setup an account on Lemmy.world, then realized that I couldn’t migrate it to another server and that when I deleted that account on that server all my comments were deleted.
Just like setting up an email on Gmail doesn’t mean you can just migrate to Outlook… and yes I would hope that deleting your account would delete all your comments. That’s a GOOD thing.
BECAUSE I understand it more now, I’m left feeling VERY uncomfortable about my data security.
What security are you talking about? There’s nothing “secure” here. You’re posting things to a public forum for all intents and purposes. What security are you expecting?
There’s no 2fa at all
Slated for release with v0.18 which will probably drop within the next few weeks or so… But if your only concern for account security is 2fa… then you probably don’t realize that long unique passwords are perfectly fine. I only really see this being an issue if you’re a moderator or admin of an instance though. As both of those things… I actually don’t currently see a problem. 2fa will be a welcomed addition though.
hacking and user-account hacking is just going to run rampant
Just like on every other service on the internet? It seems that most places do fine without this worry.
and I’m left wondering ‘Where is my username and password actually stored?’
On the instance you signed up for your account on. In your case that would appear to be lemmy.ca. That’s the only instance that even really knows who you are. The rest of the instances just believe the origin instance of the data.
The answer, sadly, is wherever the dude who’s running the instance/server is.
Yup. But that’s the case with ANY online service. Where’s your facebook data? How about the massive amounts of data that google collect on you? Where’s every bit of that? The hope and prayer is that it’s safe in some datacenter that has armed guards and all that. The reality is that data leaks happen. Engineers go home with harddrives full of backups that have all your data on it. Hell your doctors office probably has this issue… https://www.classaction.org/pediatric-data-breach-connexin. I don’t see you complaining about that. This service is not super sensitive… and if you believe it is… host your own instance.
With a large corporation, they have the staff and resources to secure and maintain the servers physically and digitally, and keep staff up-to-date on current infosec threats and get out in front of them.
And yet everyday you hear about some other company that got completely shafted… and more user information leaked out there like it belongs in the wild. But I once again have to ask… Aside from password (which is hopefully long and unique)… What content do you have on lemmy that actually matters? You realize that everything you post on a platform like this or Reddit is public… There’s nothing you should ever assume to be “secure” or private on a platform like this, including Reddit. You bring this up so many times… What are you uploading that’s sensitive that you think needs to be secure?
Finding and subbing to communities is painfully difficult. It should be one-click, but somewhere I need to goto an external list, find what I want, and then copy/paste the URL into the search… and then 50% of the time, it doesn’t work. This is an understandable growing pain and can likely be fixed by UI/UX upgrades, but for now it’s a definite turn-off.
Finally a legit concern. Yes, finding communities is actually a bit annoying. There’s work being done to fix it. Remember this is version 0.17.4 that we’re on right now. And the mass influx of people trying the platform out is putting a ton of stress on lots of undersized server instances. Things will happen… But same story with reddit… Reddit just had 3-4 hours of downtime because some subreddits went private. They’re not perfect either… what’s their excuse? It can’t be because it’s new and small…
There simply is no content. I’m not a creator, I want content aggregated for me
What? There’s TONS of content already. You need to join more communities I think. Reddit was never there to generate content either though. It’s an aggregator, not typically a source.
I didn’t have the energy to write all that and what I woud have written would have been 90% the same so thank you! The parent doesn’t know how things actually are in corporations. Neither about hosting stability, nor data security, nor regulation, nor financial security, nor responsibility. Most of the concerns they had with the random dude are valid for any typical, in other words limited liability, corporation. And the big instances are not at all hosted by some random dude. You can’t run a big instance without sysadmin knowledge at the very least. The three I have looked into, lemmy.ca, lemmy.world and lemmy.ml, are all run by either software developers or system/database admins. At least two of them are also well funded which we can tell due to the transparent funding and available track record. Small non-profit teams and organizations have made much bigger contributions to my life and society than many big corporations. From Wikipedia, through Mozilla to all the outfits behind most open source software that literally runs the world. Two random dudes write the crypto for the security that nearly every corporation uses (OpenSSL). Anyways. I’m not writing this to change minds. Just expressing my thoughts and reaction. 🥲
I tried not to bring up individual instances… but to your point there… I’m a CISO… My whole job is data security. My instance is 100% for sure safe… and honestly I probably have better tools in place than a good 80-90% of companies that you give all sorts of private information to.
I felt that point wasn’t specifically relevant, but it’s just odd that people treat companies as better than individuals in general… My uptime actually beats Amazon this year so far. And I’m hosting from hardware in my garage, which happens to be a cluster of proxmox boxes with a good dedicated 60 amps of power and 6+ hours of battery backup.
The datacenter my business is in contract with… I have better uptime than them… They’ve had 3 major outages in the past 9 months.
Businesses are not infallible… and honestly are likely worse to work with since no individual ever feels compelled to own up to the mistakes. It’s always shareholders and money with businesses. I love working with vendors that are 1-3 man teams… They are ALWAYS vested and always do good work IMO… It’s the large places that pass the buck everywhere they can and everything is always a shoe-string shitshow.
Just my additional 2 cents to continue the discussion.
Heavy agreement. Having seen how corporations host and treat data, it’s a clown show. Everyone knows noone can be held accountable beyond being fired and execs and shareholders know they can’t lose the money they already made. It’s certainly better than that in some places but that’s the baseline because those are the incentives. It’s only better if there’s lots of money on the line in case of a data breach. Real scenario from a corporation:
So should we update from Ubuntu 18.04 since it’s running out of support? Weeeell… we should but let’s write this feature first. It won’t be too bad if we run for a few months without security patches.
That’s of course security patches by some random dudes, for the software written by the random dudes.
🤦♂️🤦♀️🤦
Anyway, what’s your instance?
E: Found it.
E2: I’m falling asleep, I assumed it’s a public instance. I’ll probably be standing up my own at some point too.
https://lemmy.saik0.com is my instance. I’m treating it as the original myspace idea… friends of friends can get in. Also makes the local communities much better IMO…
Running in an LXC container on a proxmox cluster, all the data stored on a ceph cluster. Backed up nightly to a large 400TB backup server. Proxied through cloudflare (yes I’ve gotten cloudflare working correctly enough… I should probably clean up the page rules a touch…). The only thing I’m missing in my “homelab” is offsite backup… Of which I’m looking for tape libraries or similar things I can put into my rack to swap out every week or so to an offsite location.
And your example of the Ubuntu thing is even worse the moment you bring up windows environments. I know so many companies still running Windows 2012… And their reasoning? “Well it’s still supported until October right?”… Not realizing it probably takes months to a year to validate all the software they’re going to have to migrate. Clown show is accurate.
Honestly, even if most folks from Reddit don’t stay, the ones that know will most likely stay. I’ve been here for a week and I know I will. In the worst case scenario it’ll turn out like Slashdot used to be. Frequented by knowledgable folks sharing News for nerds, stuff that matters. If that’s all we get in the end, it won’t be so bad. 👌
It’s hardly been 24 hours, but this is the most engaged I’ve felt in an online space in years. I’ve gone on a k.bin/Lemmy/Mastodon tear over the past day, exploring instances and looking for the one that I vibe with the most. So far I’ve been very happy with Beehaw as my home base, and love that I still have access to the communities on the other instances as well. It takes a slight bit of effort to find communities and make sure that I’m subscribed to them on this account, but I’ve actually found some satisfaction in the process.
Sure, there’s a low volume of content compared to the old place, but if I wanted a constant barrage of content I could just go back to RSS readers and have my fill. It’s the discussion and sense of connection that has made it worth investing my time here.
I think having already used Mastodon, albeit mostly as a lurker, helped, but I didn’t find it difficult at all to get up and running on Lemmy and subscribe to a bunch of communities.
On the desktop version, thanks to not having loads of useless scripts, ads and other “stuff” on the page like Reddit does, Lemmy’s interface loads quicker in my browser than Reddit’s and is more responsive. I have had a few hiccups with Jerboa logging me out of my account and images appearing too small to view, but in general, it works well - fast, clean interface, no distractions.
The one downside really is that the content that was (is, but not accessible) on Reddit is not here yet, but that will change with time. Still, the atmosphere is much better, and I feel much more inclined to post here as there aren’t the hordes of people waiting to tear someone down who has a different opinion (cough, Reddit…) So overall, pretty good and glad I finally stumbled upon Lemmy.
it is really annoying to subscribe to communities on federated servers – there should be a link that will redirect you to your home server. As of now I seem to have to copy and paste the community address into the URL because the feddit.de community search doesn’t seem to be working for me
Still very new here and most problems I have is with filtering.
No matter if Main page or in a post.
If you subscribed to a bunch of feeds it gets quickly very confusing to find things.
You can choose top day or active, which is to long timeframe I would like to see some more customized preferences here like “Active but new 8h” or something.
Also big downside is that lemmy seems not take into account the strenght of single subs. So if I subscribe a big one like Technology my mainpage in active will 95% now only be this. It would be nice if the Active Filter also takes a bit diverse results into account and not only showing the most active sub.
A year ago, I viewed the Fediverse as an unnecessary, complicated framework created by a handful of well-intentioned individuals as a solution to a problem that wasn’t really there.
Today, I view it as a necessity.
This past year has been a hard lesson for me to stop placing trust in massive, centralized web services like Twitter and Reddit and to start federating more of my online activity. There’s going to be growing pains, but Lemmy has been pretty good so far and it’s definitely going to be worth it in the end.
Yep, same. For that reason I never really managed to get into mastodon, tried it for a bit and found the signup system too convoluted, then dropped it altogether. Though granted, I also never used Twitter, never understood why people liked it (and still don’t), so I tried mastodon out of curiosity, not actually looking for something.
With Lemmy it’s all different. I feel like I need to leave reddit and find a new community, so there’s an inherent desire to like it, which makes the adaptation way easier.
I am admittedly still active on Twitter, but during the whole Twitter exodus, I decided to give Mastodon a try, and I abandoned it because I just kept running into people complaining about Elon without seeing much else.
Until I read somewhere during this whole Reddit fiasco that you can follow hashtags in addition to people on Mastodon. Total game changer!
Valid. Spez is a liar who is angry that he got caught multiple times. I didn’t want to see Reddit die like this, but watching the train wreck sure has been interesting.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !technology@beehaw.org
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
In general, it works pretty nice, but there are some limitations.
The biggest one for me is discoverability. The federation means that there is more fragmentation and it’s harder to find the right community for something.
For example, there are country/city communities for my country/city on multiple instances. And since it’s hard to find the “correct” one, it fragments out much harder than Reddit did. Combine that with generally lower attendance numbers and you get really tiny communities.
This is not aided by Jerboa, which doesn’t open internal links internally. So if someone posts a link to a community and I press it, it instead tries to open it with my email app.
Finding “the right community” is definitely an issue, and I’m sure will continue to be one for a while. But remember Reddit had the same issue, with multiple redundant subreddits when one would have been better.
I’m sure things will consolidate over time, with less popular communities going quiet and their subscribers moving to more active ones.
That is true, that was an issue on Reddit as well. But here it’s even worse, since you can have a community with the same name on different instances. It basically adds another dimension to the discoverability issue.
It’s true, but I guess it’s the price of federation. And Reddit having a single namespace meant a lot of subreddits needed to have “real” or “true” prefixed to their names, which was pretty confusing.
It’s ugly, difficult to understand, And the search function is fucked. All in all, it’s pretty crap and I miss reddit a great deal. That said, I’m never going back. I just wish lemmy was better.
At least some things never change.
Its great. It has minimalistic ui which is verry readable and its easy to find different options and buttons. I like it much better than reddit.
Honestly, I kind of hate it, but since Reddit is unusable, considering all the subs that have gone dark (presumably permanently).
I’ll be honest. I don’t like the Fediverse concept - the fatal flaw of decentralized systems is that sometimes centralized systems are great. Basically, reddit was ONE BBS style forum for everything, which was the killer convenience. Similarly Twitter was the ONE microblogging platform for everybody, which was the killer convenience.
Because the moment anybody can operate a service, everyone does.
Right now, I need to buy a car, I can’t find a good Lemmy community to get advice from. Searching for ‘cars’ in all federated communities returns:
Leave aside for a moment that “Fuck Cars” has 34x more subscribers than the biggest Cars community - there are two different “Fuck Cars” communities, and three different “Cars” communities. It’s great that you have subscriber numbers, but there’s no definitive place to find out information on cars. Reddit’s CEO is right that Reddit was organized like a landed-gentry where a first-come-first-serve approach to the most popular forums was done, but that landed-gentry system solved this problem, whatever new problems it may have introduced.
Now, you could look for a technological solution to solve this problem: For example, you could have a centralized server for all federated Lemmies, some sort of “lemmyhub.com”
We’d all have to agree on it. People could set up alternatives, but we’d all have to basically coalesce and say: Yes, this is the thing we want. Maybe it’d use blockchain, I don’t know. Point is, it’s centralized and easy to find information. It would work “just like Reddit” where you would have ONE authentication/authorization that works seamlessly across all instances (the current system is anything but seamless), and there would be ONE key/value combo for keyword. So, instead of going to Cars@lemmy.ml & Cars@lemmygrad.ml & Cars & lemmy.world, you just go to cars.lemmyhub.com.
If you want to post, you just use your lemmyhub account and your post appears on the “default” community. You can still post on individual lemmies by going to the individual lemmy page as well, or by specifying which of your Lemmy instance accounts you want to post as.
Here’s the problem with the merging all the cars communities together, though: There is nothing to prevent someone from creating Cars@NeoNaziHeartsFascism.com and spamming the community with bile or trolling. Lemmyhub could operate a blocklist for troll and hate communities and instances, but once you’re doing that, you’re making editorial decisions. And forget all the nasty ethics problems around “what’s free speech/what’s hate speech?” “what’s acceptable to view/what’s not?”, you have legal liability problems if anything slips through the cracks.
Reddit wasn’t perfect, and certainly they could have been more proactive with shutting down hate speech, and more speedy with shutting down illegal content, but by and large reddit worked. Reddit’s authoritarian approach worked because it was mostly benevolent – right up until the point that it wasn’t.
So I don’t think Lemmy can technologically make it’s way out of the situation.
I think what needs to happen is a solution like the Wikipedia foundation; we establish a non-profit designed to create a centralized server which may choose or not choose to incorporate Lemmy instances. It runs on donations, not advertising, and it’s not designed to maximize profit, only to keep the servers running. It would borrow heavily from the Wikipedia model in organization and structure.
Because I’ll be honest - Lemmy and Mastodon are okay, but there’s really nothing in them improving on the old Newsgroups system of the late 80s and 1990s. Reddit captured the market for forum discussions because it was simply a better solution, there’s nothing in Lemmy that makes it better - for the user - than Reddit.
Should we then abandon Lemmy and go back to Reddit? No, of course not. Reddit, if anything shows us that eventually all authoritarian systems, no matter how benevolent they start, always eventually turn tyrannical, and can do so on a whim, and once they do so, it is impossible to get back to benevolence.
But I’ve been a redditor for 15 years - I predated subreddits, if you can believe that. And I’m not finding the things I used to go to Reddit for here on Lemmy - information, expert and informed discussion, and niche topics. Maybe that’s an adoption problem that will be solved with scale (and I hope it is), but right now, I feel like my luxury Bently sedan got totaled and I’m driving a 20 year old Honda Civic with manual transmission. By all means I’m grateful for the tent, but I still miss my Bentley
I like it - I just want a few Reddit-ish features:
Hiding reply chains for scrolling cleanliness in comments of a post(1.) should already be here, at least - on the web version it’s the
[-]icon next the commenter’s name, and on Jerboa you just tap the top bar of the comment. Agree that there should be a way to hide posts permanently - it’s kind of annoying to always scroll past the same pinned posts at the top of the “Local” view.That is a strange place for that to be, but thank you for the tip.
I love it. I love how I don’t usually have to deal with “right-wing” extremists. They’re usually contained to lemmy.grab, but I suppose one or two might break containment every now and then.
Still, a hell of lot better then seeing their bullshit as the first comment on a new post. :|
I’m still trying to get my head above water, but I’ve learned enough to start being able to browse and post. I still haven’t found the instance I want to use as a home instance, and don’t know how to browse instances other than the one i’m on. But these things come in time, and im willing to learn.
I am nicely surprised over all about the number of comments, it look promising.
As it is, I will make the definitive switch when Rif die. I am not a power user of Reddit or a mod.
Something I think is very important for a succesfull migration en masse is the presence of porn.
It’s here (even some niche fetish I enjoy ) and there is already enough content for me not to go back.
Also the atmosphere is very friendly , I don’t know the friendlyness of Reddit in its early days but I bet it was kind of similar, I love it here.
Sure some content is missing but it will come.
Used Reddit for 13 years, tried out Kbin and Lemmy yesterday and settled on Lemmy.
Long story short, I’m going back to Reddit.
I initially setup an account on Lemmy.world, then realized that I couldn’t migrate it to another server and that when I deleted that account on that server all my comments were deleted.
Deciphering the distributed nature of it took me, a relatively tech-friendly person, almost the entire day and several ‘What the fuck?’ posts. I now understand it more. There are some very low-level guides that have been haphazardly put together, but there absolutely needs to be a MUCH smoother guide/explanation to this whole thing. That learning process will turn people away for sure.
With a large corporation, they have the staff and resources to secure and maintain the servers physically and digitally, and keep staff up-to-date on current infosec threats and get out in front of them. Beyond that, if there IS a breach, they have the ability to recognize it, understand the legalities and requirements of reporting it, and can be held accountable by regulatory bodies. Joe doesn’t have the resources to really maintain and keep a server running, nor the knowledge of his responsibilities for keeping the data safe digitally or physically.
On top of that, if Joe’s basement loses power/gets hacked/Joe decides he’s moving to San Fransisco and can’t bring his NAS with him and the server goes down, and that’s where my instance is hosted well there goes my entire account/comments/data.
Finding and subbing to communities is painfully difficult. It should be one-click, but somewhere I need to goto an external list, find what I want, and then copy/paste the URL into the search… and then 50% of the time, it doesn’t work. This is an understandable growing pain and can likely be fixed by UI/UX upgrades, but for now it’s a definite turn-off.
There simply is no content. I’m not a creator, I want content aggregated for me, and I’ve gotten used to having a single place to get it from that floods me with thousands of different articles/memes/posts/etc every minute. Until the user base arrives in one single place and starts generating content, there’s no reason for most people like me to be there as by far the larger number of users never create anything at all and only exist to consume the content generated.
Sorry, but a lot of your concerns you outline, I just don’t agree with.
No… Reddit’s singular biggest issue is the fact that everyone is beholden to Reddit’s whim. Leaving any of this to any singular company/persons whims is a big problem. Moderator banned you from a subreddit cause they powertrip? What’s your recourse? You have none.
And yet emails are not a problem. Why specifically is this off putting? You’ve never emailed anyone outside of gmail.com? or outlook.com?
Statistically this is very wrong. Quite the opposite in fact. Users are terrible at identifying ANYTHING malicious as actually being “Wrong”.
Just like setting up an email on Gmail doesn’t mean you can just migrate to Outlook… and yes I would hope that deleting your account would delete all your comments. That’s a GOOD thing.
What security are you talking about? There’s nothing “secure” here. You’re posting things to a public forum for all intents and purposes. What security are you expecting?
Slated for release with v0.18 which will probably drop within the next few weeks or so… But if your only concern for account security is 2fa… then you probably don’t realize that long unique passwords are perfectly fine. I only really see this being an issue if you’re a moderator or admin of an instance though. As both of those things… I actually don’t currently see a problem. 2fa will be a welcomed addition though.
Just like on every other service on the internet? It seems that most places do fine without this worry.
On the instance you signed up for your account on. In your case that would appear to be lemmy.ca. That’s the only instance that even really knows who you are. The rest of the instances just believe the origin instance of the data.
Yup. But that’s the case with ANY online service. Where’s your facebook data? How about the massive amounts of data that google collect on you? Where’s every bit of that? The hope and prayer is that it’s safe in some datacenter that has armed guards and all that. The reality is that data leaks happen. Engineers go home with harddrives full of backups that have all your data on it. Hell your doctors office probably has this issue… https://www.classaction.org/pediatric-data-breach-connexin. I don’t see you complaining about that. This service is not super sensitive… and if you believe it is… host your own instance.
And yet everyday you hear about some other company that got completely shafted… and more user information leaked out there like it belongs in the wild. But I once again have to ask… Aside from password (which is hopefully long and unique)… What content do you have on lemmy that actually matters? You realize that everything you post on a platform like this or Reddit is public… There’s nothing you should ever assume to be “secure” or private on a platform like this, including Reddit. You bring this up so many times… What are you uploading that’s sensitive that you think needs to be secure?
Finally a legit concern. Yes, finding communities is actually a bit annoying. There’s work being done to fix it. Remember this is version 0.17.4 that we’re on right now. And the mass influx of people trying the platform out is putting a ton of stress on lots of undersized server instances. Things will happen… But same story with reddit… Reddit just had 3-4 hours of downtime because some subreddits went private. They’re not perfect either… what’s their excuse? It can’t be because it’s new and small…
What? There’s TONS of content already. You need to join more communities I think. Reddit was never there to generate content either though. It’s an aggregator, not typically a source.
I didn’t have the energy to write all that and what I woud have written would have been 90% the same so thank you! The parent doesn’t know how things actually are in corporations. Neither about hosting stability, nor data security, nor regulation, nor financial security, nor responsibility. Most of the concerns they had with the random dude are valid for any typical, in other words limited liability, corporation. And the big instances are not at all hosted by some random dude. You can’t run a big instance without sysadmin knowledge at the very least. The three I have looked into, lemmy.ca, lemmy.world and lemmy.ml, are all run by either software developers or system/database admins. At least two of them are also well funded which we can tell due to the transparent funding and available track record. Small non-profit teams and organizations have made much bigger contributions to my life and society than many big corporations. From Wikipedia, through Mozilla to all the outfits behind most open source software that literally runs the world. Two random dudes write the crypto for the security that nearly every corporation uses (OpenSSL). Anyways. I’m not writing this to change minds. Just expressing my thoughts and reaction. 🥲
I tried not to bring up individual instances… but to your point there… I’m a CISO… My whole job is data security. My instance is 100% for sure safe… and honestly I probably have better tools in place than a good 80-90% of companies that you give all sorts of private information to.
I felt that point wasn’t specifically relevant, but it’s just odd that people treat companies as better than individuals in general… My uptime actually beats Amazon this year so far. And I’m hosting from hardware in my garage, which happens to be a cluster of proxmox boxes with a good dedicated 60 amps of power and 6+ hours of battery backup.
The datacenter my business is in contract with… I have better uptime than them… They’ve had 3 major outages in the past 9 months.
Businesses are not infallible… and honestly are likely worse to work with since no individual ever feels compelled to own up to the mistakes. It’s always shareholders and money with businesses. I love working with vendors that are 1-3 man teams… They are ALWAYS vested and always do good work IMO… It’s the large places that pass the buck everywhere they can and everything is always a shoe-string shitshow.
Just my additional 2 cents to continue the discussion.
Heavy agreement. Having seen how corporations host and treat data, it’s a clown show. Everyone knows noone can be held accountable beyond being fired and execs and shareholders know they can’t lose the money they already made. It’s certainly better than that in some places but that’s the baseline because those are the incentives. It’s only better if there’s lots of money on the line in case of a data breach. Real scenario from a corporation:
That’s of course security patches by some random dudes, for the software written by the random dudes.
🤦♂️🤦♀️🤦
Anyway, what’s your instance?
E: Found it.
E2: I’m falling asleep, I assumed it’s a public instance. I’ll probably be standing up my own at some point too.
https://lemmy.saik0.com is my instance. I’m treating it as the original myspace idea… friends of friends can get in. Also makes the local communities much better IMO…
Running in an LXC container on a proxmox cluster, all the data stored on a ceph cluster. Backed up nightly to a large 400TB backup server. Proxied through cloudflare (yes I’ve gotten cloudflare working correctly enough… I should probably clean up the page rules a touch…). The only thing I’m missing in my “homelab” is offsite backup… Of which I’m looking for tape libraries or similar things I can put into my rack to swap out every week or so to an offsite location.
And your example of the Ubuntu thing is even worse the moment you bring up windows environments. I know so many companies still running Windows 2012… And their reasoning? “Well it’s still supported until October right?”… Not realizing it probably takes months to a year to validate all the software they’re going to have to migrate. Clown show is accurate.
Great stuff.
Honestly, even if most folks from Reddit don’t stay, the ones that know will most likely stay. I’ve been here for a week and I know I will. In the worst case scenario it’ll turn out like Slashdot used to be. Frequented by knowledgable folks sharing News for nerds, stuff that matters. If that’s all we get in the end, it won’t be so bad. 👌
But I think a lot more will stay.
Anyway, good night!
It’s hardly been 24 hours, but this is the most engaged I’ve felt in an online space in years. I’ve gone on a k.bin/Lemmy/Mastodon tear over the past day, exploring instances and looking for the one that I vibe with the most. So far I’ve been very happy with Beehaw as my home base, and love that I still have access to the communities on the other instances as well. It takes a slight bit of effort to find communities and make sure that I’m subscribed to them on this account, but I’ve actually found some satisfaction in the process.
Sure, there’s a low volume of content compared to the old place, but if I wanted a constant barrage of content I could just go back to RSS readers and have my fill. It’s the discussion and sense of connection that has made it worth investing my time here.
I think having already used Mastodon, albeit mostly as a lurker, helped, but I didn’t find it difficult at all to get up and running on Lemmy and subscribe to a bunch of communities.
On the desktop version, thanks to not having loads of useless scripts, ads and other “stuff” on the page like Reddit does, Lemmy’s interface loads quicker in my browser than Reddit’s and is more responsive. I have had a few hiccups with Jerboa logging me out of my account and images appearing too small to view, but in general, it works well - fast, clean interface, no distractions.
The one downside really is that the content that was (is, but not accessible) on Reddit is not here yet, but that will change with time. Still, the atmosphere is much better, and I feel much more inclined to post here as there aren’t the hordes of people waiting to tear someone down who has a different opinion (cough, Reddit…) So overall, pretty good and glad I finally stumbled upon Lemmy.
He was the best frontman motörhead ever had
it is really annoying to subscribe to communities on federated servers – there should be a link that will redirect you to your home server. As of now I seem to have to copy and paste the community address into the URL because the feddit.de community search doesn’t seem to be working for me
Still very new here and most problems I have is with filtering. No matter if Main page or in a post.
If you subscribed to a bunch of feeds it gets quickly very confusing to find things. You can choose top day or active, which is to long timeframe I would like to see some more customized preferences here like “Active but new 8h” or something.
Also big downside is that lemmy seems not take into account the strenght of single subs. So if I subscribe a big one like Technology my mainpage in active will 95% now only be this. It would be nice if the Active Filter also takes a bit diverse results into account and not only showing the most active sub.
A year ago, I viewed the Fediverse as an unnecessary, complicated framework created by a handful of well-intentioned individuals as a solution to a problem that wasn’t really there.
Today, I view it as a necessity.
This past year has been a hard lesson for me to stop placing trust in massive, centralized web services like Twitter and Reddit and to start federating more of my online activity. There’s going to be growing pains, but Lemmy has been pretty good so far and it’s definitely going to be worth it in the end.
Yep, same. For that reason I never really managed to get into mastodon, tried it for a bit and found the signup system too convoluted, then dropped it altogether. Though granted, I also never used Twitter, never understood why people liked it (and still don’t), so I tried mastodon out of curiosity, not actually looking for something.
With Lemmy it’s all different. I feel like I need to leave reddit and find a new community, so there’s an inherent desire to like it, which makes the adaptation way easier.
I am admittedly still active on Twitter, but during the whole Twitter exodus, I decided to give Mastodon a try, and I abandoned it because I just kept running into people complaining about Elon without seeing much else.
Until I read somewhere during this whole Reddit fiasco that you can follow hashtags in addition to people on Mastodon. Total game changer!
That sucks, we don’t complain about Elon here.
Instead we just complain about Reddit
Valid. Spez is a liar who is angry that he got caught multiple times. I didn’t want to see Reddit die like this, but watching the train wreck sure has been interesting.
Spez has been around since basically the beginning of Reddit, so I think if there were to be an ejection of Spez, it would’ve happened years ago.
Reddit is too big to fail now, regardless of Spez’s actions.
Sure, but Reddit is nothing without their mods and power users.
Eh, looking at it from supply and demand, I’m sure there are plenty of people lining up to become the next mods and next power users