Technology

It feels so freaking empty, maybe it's my lemmy client but I can't see any post older than two days

Google Power Delete Suite. Don't leave your content there for them to use.

I think it will take time to smooth few rough edges but already now it's usable.

However I have big concerns on how this structure can scale, it already suffers with few thousands users. Plus security, privacy and sustainability of the fediverse is still a big question mark to me.

But it's exciting and I hope it will be the future of socials.

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:

Fuck Cars@lemmy.ml - 3.41K subscribers
Cars@lemmy.ml - 104 subscribers
Fuck Cars@lemmy.ca - 56 subscribers
Self Driving Cars - 19 subscribers
IdiotsInCars@lemmy.world - 11 subscribers
Electric Cars@lemmy.ca - 4 subscribers
RC Cars@lemmy.world - 4 subscribers
Cars@lemmygrad.ml - 3 subscribers
Fuck Cars@lemmy.world - 2 subscribers
Cars@lemmy.world - 1 subscriber

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

He was the best frontman motörhead ever had

It seems fine. Basically like reddit before it got all corprate

I’m happy to be a part of growing this community. I like that no one is trying to make money from my engagement.

Touch and feel is comfortable (if I can remember to middle-click links so I don't keep closing Lemmy tab), communities are growing, framework looks robust. My only concern is that if I ever move from one server to another (if I decide to self-host), it appears I'll need to manually rebuild all of my subscriptions which sounds painful.

it needs time and more users, but I think it's alright so far.

I had looked into a couple other decentralized or federated services in the past and they seemed like kind of a pain or they were poorly explained. until now, all of it also seemed too obscure to have any kind of notable traffic. if this isn't temporary and the reddit api controversy actually did something meaningful, then I look forward to seeing how the federated service ecosystem grows and changes.

reddit's dethroning was a long time coming in my eyes. it's just not going to be as smooth as the digg -> reddit pipeline years ago.

I think there may be room for another couple million users spread across a ton of communities. wishful thinking, but maybe that would keeps thing toned down with the bots and other shady shit.

lots of polish and QoL needed both on the main site(s) and the mobile offerings out so far. all in all, pretty good start.

The learning curve is steep but I'm feeling very optimistic and excited to be a part of a new community. Reddit had been going downhill for years ( I joined in 2010).

I plan to stay no matter what reddit does next.

Right now it's feeling pretty darn small. Once it hits a million users, it'll feel fine.

I like being here. A bit part of it is my desire to host my own stuff. I've never been much of a contributor on Reddit, but now that my instance is reporting to have some actual users it just feels so rewarding! Love the sense of the earlier decentralized internet.

Havn't tried Lemmy yet... does my comment show up alright coming from fedia.io? The fediverse is neat.

One thing that I'm looking for is to see where (if?) the moderation teams and content providers of existing subreddits migrate over to Lemmy/Kbin and if the Reddit userbase migrate as well and become the de-facto communities on subjects.

I guess that's part of the community aspect that Reddit harboured with the moderators - that they infer and define the culture and dynamics of their particular subreddit - and if I have the choice of three or four fediverse communities on the same topic, I can maintain some continuity by joining the one maintained by the ex-Reddit mods.

It's like leaving infant school and going to high school - amongst the hundreds of strangers, it'd be good to see a few familiar faces.

It's very interesting and I remember wishing for a long time that "two-server" protocols like email would start being made again. I already switched from Twitter to Mastodon last fall and don't regret that in the slightest. The community here seems nice so far, and the UI is simple and clean.

I've encountered some glitches like the live-update feature seemingly changing what post I'm viewing and mixing comments from the two posts. The instance I picked has had some performance issues and has gone down a couple times, but I'm chalking that up to a mass influx of users and activity (of which I'm very much a part).

I could use a browser extension that just adds an "open this post/community/user in my home instance" button when I'm browsing another instance so I can interact. Also some ability to put a link to e.g. a community in your post text that automatically sends you to that community via the instance you are viewing the post in.

I feel like it's more of a community than Reddit. There is more collective spirit here right now.
I'm concerned about the tankie baggage.

I have been enjoying it so far, the software feels quite similar to old reddit in many ways but the community so far is a bit less toxic. If anyone is wishing to use it on iPad I recommend going to your instance and in the share menu adding it to the home page as there isn't yet a good option for iPad.

I am also looking forward to the addition of 2fa in the next update

My guess is that redditers will want lemmy to be just like....reddit, but without the public-corp nonsense and with UI that is at minimum on-par with 3rd party apps people gravitate toward on reddit.

I'm totally new to this so I'm also figuring out my way around. The federated organization is confusing for sure, but not so much that people can't get it.

Some work could be done from a user focus... Simplify(including caring for duplicated hosts and communities), educate on lemmy's benefits, make searching for new communities seamless and less of a quest.

I love it! I'm looking around the fediverse and the options are impressive.

I feel the generation gap for the first time when I see people complaining about the difficulty of selecting a server to sign up and connect to!

Other than that, it does bring a lot of the atmosphere of the wild west times of the web, in a good way. I'm liking it!

Hopefully we retain a healthy amount of users after this wave passes and everyone is back at reddit. :)

I'm still confused by the instance decentralized structure. And my feed seems chaotic. But so far I'm liking it !

It's ok so far. It's a lot more fragmented than reddit, which is a good thing in the long term even though it's annoying now.

I'd also like there to be an easier way for me to filter topics I don't want to see, like communities for languages I don't speak or furry porn.

I would love to see a way to block communities from my feed directly from my feed. As it stands, it appears that I have to go to the main community page to do so.