I was really skeptical of lemmy [1] when I first heard about it during the blackout. I joined yesterday and it completely changed my mind. Yes, it is going to face some growing pains (see the total user growth in the past few days) [2] in the coming weeks and months but it really has the potential to replace Reddit with a federated system of communities. One that won't be damaged by investors or executives attempting to pivot over to the latest social media trend.
As many people have recently noted, Reddit quietly became an extremely important repository of text-based knowledge. Distinct from Wikipedia and Archive.org, but no less important, Reddit is full of valuable procedural (how-to) and consumer (product-related) knowledge. Reddit has countless small communities built around hobbies and other niche interests, which places it in the same role once fulfilled by Usenet and later independent web-based forums.
While those technologies still exist, they face enormous challenges with discovery (try to find a new forum on Google recently?), single-sign-on, and moderation. These were all solved by Reddit and I believe lemmy solves them too. The fediverse [3] truly has the potential to liberate small internet communities from the vagaries of Big Social Media, of which Reddit is only the latest example.
Lemmy has the same discoverability and usability problems as Mastodon. Especially for non-technical users, there's too much friction required to find their communities and aggregate them into a single usable feed with a nice client. And that's assuming they can even conceptualize what the fediverse is.
I'm a technical user, and I closed join-lemmy.org after ten seconds because it was too many clicks to get to an interface that looked like Reddit. I did manage to find a community by clicking "join," and arbitrarily picking one of the communities on the page (which were presented in random order on every page load). I was disoriented and didn't know what this community was - did I land on the equivalent of a subreddit? Or is this a federated instance that includes all "subreddits" the server is connected to? Then I saw an intimidating user interface with sparse activity and low numbers of comments. So I concluded that if that's how I felt as a technically sophisticated user, then Lemmy doesn't stand a chance of gaining traction with the average redditor. I went back to Reddit and noticed most of the subs I like are done with their blackout.
Lemmy can succeed, but it needs a usable client that abstracts away the complexity of federation and choosing which servers to join. It seems like a perfect opportunity for Apollo, RIF, and the other award winning Reddit clients that are about to shut down. Why not port their apps to point to Lemmy backend(s) instead of Reddit? They could bring their loyal userbase to Lemmy, solving the chicken-and-egg problem and helping to bootstrap activity. And they can keep their UI, solving the problem of the intimidating user interface that would otherwise inhibit adoption of Lemmy.
It seems like there is a relatively straight-forward path to integration, but the opportunity window is probably closing soon. They'd need to act fast. The first step would probably be for Lemmy contributors to build an open source interopability layer that implements the Reddit API (maybe this already exists?), and for the client apps to figure out how to add one more layer of indirection to their interface ("servers").
Join a Server - Run a Server - Follow communities anywhere in the world
Lemmy is a selfhosted social link aggregation and discussion platform.
No, no. You lead with the benefits to the user. This isn't Github.
It suffers from the same problem as Mastodon - "Join a server". But which one?
These federated things need to be set up so that there's "no wrong door". Enter anywhere, see the same stuff regardless of where it's hosted. Discovery and hosting may be distributed behind the scenes, but they have to have a unified user entry point.
USENET had that problem solved. It was federated, but it didn't look federated to the end user.
> No, no. You lead with the benefits to the user. This isn't Github
Seriously. Have a default server (or set of defaults) newbies dump into after completing a simple sign-up flow. Then let them move it as they benefit from the product and gain an incentive to learn about it.
Reddit is up in arms about API pricing and mods. Do you think the average Reddit user would have signed up if they had to first jump through hoops to prove their respect for community-based architecture? No! An infintessimal fraction of users care about philosophy or architecture, even when those values and decisions directly cause effects they follow. Users came for their cat pics. Give them their cat pics. Pitch them on the back end afterwards.
> An infintessimal fraction of users care about philosophy or architecture [...] Users came for their cat pics. Give them their cat pics. Pitch them on the back end afterwards.
I'm afraid you don't understand the concept of the fediverse. The philosophy is the point. Making reddit2 is completely useless. This is not a product, it's a vision of how we manage communications as a society. It implies involvement, because in a democracy you are part of the decision process, and you act as a community. Your egocentric, utilitarian, self-obsessed mindset is the complete opposite.
I can't be really surprised to see this on hn, but oh well.
> philosophy is the point. Making reddit2 is completely useless. This is not a product, it's a vision of how we manage communications as a society.
Nothing about cleaner onboarding requires anyone to compromise principles. And nothing about a guiding philosophy requires you constantly evangelize. Let the merits of the system speak for itself.
> implies involvement, because in a democracy you are part of the decision process, and you act as a community
Then the sign-up page is a poll test. Democratic ambition strives to make participation easy. That doesn't mean the act of participating is easy. Just that we identify needless barriers and ideological tests as undemocratic. As a result, democracies--time and again--outcompete their centralized peers.
What I'm seeing is not competitive, and it is not democratic. It's closer to theological. I'm hopeful that someone will embrace these principles more productively so we have middle ground between Huffman-Musk and crypto/web3.
For a more precise background* I don't believe a representative democracy, where we must abandon all power to someone else who we hepe will do the right thing is a model we should be pursuing. Polls are not a good thing per se, they're only better than the worse methods.
What happens here is that we have the occasion to take control of our community gatherings. How do you take control if you don't even know what you're talking about ? How can you discuss the form of society we're building if you don't want to discuss and be told how to think ?
Now, I understand that what I'm asking for is out of the norms, because we're not used to decide collectively and run our own lives, the entirety of our education and our lives happens with someone else taking decisions for us. It's comfortable, we don't need to think too much, especially when we agree with the decisions. Here is the occasion to do it differently. Why not do it ? And if picking an instance is too hard, why not pick a random one ? We want to have the best thing for us individually, but we want to be told what it is. We want to not be subjects to the whims of the owner of a platform, but we don't want to understand where we're setting foot and prefer a generic instance that will be for everyone. Hust lite reddit, but different. That's not building, that's consuming, and if you're only there to consume, do you really want a democracy ? It sounds like a benevolent dictatorship is better.
In short, I don't believe actual democracy can happen without understanding the situation.
Brilliant. This properly frames so much of what I have been seeing. I actually worked at a social media building their applications. When our business people spent so much time telling us to build things to show the user what we wanted to show them, I always thought how idiotic it was that we would pretend to know what our users want. It's a form of corporate narcissism. I left :)
So if I buy the philosophy (which I do), how do I (practically) get started? Let's say I want to use the internet to actually interact with people in my community. Is that even possible anymore? Do I just download Mastadon and start wandering the dark? I've wanted to penetrate this "intellectual" space but I just do not know how, and I am a software architect of 20 years.
Approach it like evaluating dependencies, or maybe researching a political candidate. View a few different federated-social sites, with test accounts if needed. Rank what you like about them on a spreadsheet. Mark users or discussion threads you want to follow.
Then when you want to participate, that's your starting point. Lots of people are lurk-centric, but you are already in the comments section here, so moving your posting probably will not be the issue so much as contextualizing it, which the different software and instances do help with.
A lot of "community" is in having some ritual, some events to show up for, or some events you organize yourself. It doesn't take a lot of those to fill up a calendar, but it definitionally needs to be non-zero.
> Why not do it ? And if picking an instance is too hard, why not pick a random one ? We want to have the best thing for us individually, but we want to be told what it is
This isn’t how actual democracies form. Solon and Cleisthenes didn’t gingerly nudge their ways towards democracy; that would have been a gift to Athens’ elite to stymie them. They put forward swooping reforms that changed who held power and brought everyone* into the tent at once. They told people why their ideas were better, because they were. (There is actually a great analogy here in the tribes. Tribes were assigned. You could later change them, but there wasn’t a giant before we start being useful we have to put on these hats process.)
Providing a simple path isn’t the same as taking away the difficult one. You can deal with a newbie pool from which one must “graduate” in some amount of time, for instance, thereby giving nobody a default bias advantage in users.
Systems compete. Ideas compete. I think the collective ideas the internet were founded on were strong. And not every one of them need be a cultural force—it’s fine for e-mail to be practical even if it’s in practice controlled by a few companies. But this actually has that opportunity to create a new culture, and it’s throwing it away by telling the curious it’s too good for them.
If the philosophy is the point, it's a dead platform. Utopian ideals are fine, if that's your thing. Shaming people who don't share them is just rude. I don't see how you can compare the platform to the democratic process and not expect the same warts you see in democracies. A few people care a lot, some people care a bit, most people barely care at all. Grandstanding will never change that.
I've said it in a sibling post, but I don't believe our political systems are perfect models of democracy but are closer to benevolent dictatorships. It's comfortable, but that's not xhat the fediverse is about. There are plenty of centralized platforms with exactly the same problems as reddit, the fediverse is about building something else.
If there are no successful, extant examples, then I don't think it's a good basis for anything. As I said, it's a Utopian ideal. That's fine, but it's not practical (and it's not trying to be).
I think there are going to be incredibly valuable lessons-learned from these federated models, and interesting things will happen there. However, all of that will be capitalized by a nimble, forward-thinking, idealistic-yet-centralized model that gets rid of all the ideological cruft and polishes a real, useful, and engaging product.
You need to define what "successful" means, because I feel we don't have the same definition. To me, being able to control the medium and communicate with the people I'm interested in is already a success. The fediverse is home to millions of people and is open for anyone to join. It's not a product, because "products" suck; it's a system that involves people and is under constant evolution.
The "product" mentality is the cancer that led us to where we are. We must get rid of it.
> I think there are going to be incredibly valuable lessons-learned from these federated models, and interesting things will happen there.
I totally agree with that. The control an admin has over an instance is still problematic, and someone shared something about confederated protocols (https://nexus.blacksky.network/zine/00000001/confederal-prot...) and that is an interesting way forward.
If all you care about is the philosophy, then you're going to fail. Most people only care about the end product, the end experience. And unfortunately you still need those people (to some extent) since these sorts of things require some kind of critical mass to be successful.
Fail at what exactly ? What are your criterias for success ? If it's something like eternal growth ana scalability, I would consider that a failure. My criteria is if everyone has access to the people they care about, in conditions they control. Commercial success is not for me.
> Most people only care about the end product, the end experience.
Because that's what we keep telling them: don't think, let me take care of this, CEO knows better. That is how we arrive at this crooked situation where sharholders come first, business partners second, and users last.
Sadly most people are the herd and the herd wants to be force-fed. All the better, I prefer smaller more engaged communities anyway. Diamond in the rough, lucky are the few, etc.
Lemmy has the same functionality, and allows people to both control their own conditions and talk to anyone. That's the reason this whole ruckus is happening. Centralized alternatives don't have that. I don't know who said lemmy is an alternative to reddit, because just like mastodon/twitter, it's not. Or rather, not so simple.
There is no mass market solution to both the problems Reddit solves and the ones Lemmy solves. Anything like Reddit which is optimized for easy access and broad engagement will draw a lot of non-contributing users, a lot of spammers, trolls, etc., is unwieldy to run, and will need to suck eventually when it comes time to monetize the network effects. Anything like Lemmy, which can be self-supported and necessarily allows people to run and manage their own fiefdoms in ways that are manageable for them, means there is an added layer of complexity which inhibits easy access and broad engagement. To the extent Lemmy can be made easier to navigate, sign up for, or create communities with, it should be. No one should have to recompile a Lemmy kernel or anything, not that it's anything like that. Neither should anyone expect or even want it to be Reddit, which just deferred figuring out how to sustain itself during a prolonged giveaway of utility before its inevitable enshitification.
Early internet was good because there were technical barriers to entry. Then the floodgates opened.
IMO, this will be the future of high quality interaction. Either small communities that are federated to prevent the same issue forums had, or places that charge a monthly fee for entry.
I don’t know much about how the fediverse thing works. Would it be theoretically possible to have something kind of like how torrents work, with some central list of all servers acting as the “tracker list”?:
- Servers choose what they want to host and what their personal bandwidth limit is
- A user visiting a specific subforum automatically downloads from whatever servers are currently available to serve it
Then you’d never have to manually choose a server.
You don't have an identity on a torrent unless you join a server.
Similarly, you need to join a Lemmy server to have an identity there, or anywhere on Lemmy. Unlike private torrent trackers, you only need 1 Lemmy identity, and you can subscribe to other servers' communities from your original server.
Trackerless torrents are very old now, they use the DHT network to find peers. I believe it needs to be seeded when you first start a newly installed client, but that's completely transparent to the user.
Progress is not linear. Young communities should and do alienate low effort and disinterested parties from participating while allowing anyone sufficiently interested to participate. We will find out if federated communities work because people will try to make them work in good faith, and if the core idea is good, it will be made universally applicable. The digital soldiers that thanklessly represent the technological status quo will always concern troll anything that isn't made by one of four companies for being insufficiently popular. Their input, like all the clamors of old-guard clingers-on will wash away, and they will be left with the basement full of floppy drives they thought would last forever. And the world will continue to turn and normal people will en-masse use technology that was once dismissed as having "too much sign-up flow friction" or "cognitive load" by patagonia wearing matcha sippers: people that will fall out from the world's grace just as quickly as they entered it.
>It suffers from the same problem as Mastodon - "Join a server". But which one?
[...]
USENET had that problem solved. It was federated, but it didn't look federated to the end user.
USENET also had the "chose the wrong server" problem.
If I chose my ISP (e.g. Verizon) as my USENET entry point, then I would miss out on many newsgroups that Verizon didn't have. Or, Verizon had the newsgroup but had extremely short retention of old messages history.
So, I paid $12.99/month for GigaNews to get all the newsgroups with months-to-years retention.
Lemmy/Mastodon/etc replicate the same federation issues as USENET because running servers costs money and different people have different thresholds of spending. This independence/freedom of the admin running the server the particular way they want is touted as a positive but it also has inherent disadvantages.
The contemporary situation of Beehaw instance defederating lemmy.world -- is replaying the same tradeoffs that USENET went through. (E.g. similar to an ISP's USENET service choosing not to carry alt.binaries.* or whatever.) Beehaw explains they have limited resources and can't handle the influx from lemmy.world. Yep. Very understandable.
This is actually as designed, and is a good thing.
It creates the possibility for a business model where subscribers pay for access to a big news spool and lots of groups. Just like USENet.
There will be some growing pains, but there will eventually be a continuum of "free" lemmy servers, for pay premium ones, and lemmy servers where the front end is only an app on your phone.
Why do different Mastodon instances decide on not federating some of the other instances?!? It's because the owners pay money for running their particular server which makes them feel entitled to run it the way they want.
The "pick any server, it doesn't make any difference, you'll see _all_ messages anyway" -- is not realistic given that each fediverse node administrator can exercise their freedom to choose what messages their server accepts.
> The "pick any server, it doesn't make any difference, you'll see _all_ messages anyway" -- is not realistic given that each fediverse node administrator can exercise their freedom to choose what messages their server accepts.
That is true, but most Mastodon apps make multi-accounting a breeze, and I imagine the Lemmy ecosystem will provide the same functionality.
It also helps that Lemmy is trying to court the userbase of Reddit, who are already a pseudo-anonymous lot and in my experience don't seem to have as much of an attachment to their old content as Twitter users, deleting their old posts and accounts on a regular basis.
This is a generic problem when discovery and storage are combined.
Originally, Google was pure discovery. There was no Google content, just links. That's pure discovery. A standalone blog is pure content. Together, you have a social system.
Separating those is a step to freedom from oppressive service providers.
So well said. After the Twitter apocalypse I joined Mastodon, but the instance I joined (mastodon.world) was missing a lot of people that did advertise they were on Mastodon… So I clicked some links from those people and managed to follow them. But I cannot just search for people or topics now? I first need a link to another instance? What is this, a second job?
Truth Social is the most successful Mastodon instance by far despite being garbage because it has a clear, consistent design and user interface, and has exclusive content from an extremely popular influencer. Any Mastodon or Lemmy instance that wants to truly replace Reddit needs that, Gmail doesn’t present itself as a federated messaging platform and make you jump through 30 hoops to join while having arbitrary management that bans at random
Isn't this the same problem IRC had but IRC was (still is?) fairly widely used? (Wikipedia says its peak was about 10mil in 2004/2005 - which makes it 1% according to here: https://www.internetworldstats.com/emarketing.htm)
Regardless, if I was able to capture 1% of the net, that's not a failure by any stretch.
How did IRC succeed here? Have any hard evidence as opposed to intuition or speculation?
I actually don't think IRC is doing that well. I used to have a bouncer but I shut it down a few months ago because most of my communities had moved over to Discord. But I think the reason why Discord and Slack took over was not because IRC was decentralized, but because the protocol was never designed for mobile devices where you might not always be connected to a server.
It didn't help that the protocol evolved at an absolutely glacial pace with very uneven support across various networks, and doing anything but the most trivial sorts of channel management had to be done through a bot. Matrix seems like the obvious IRC successor due to its seamless two-way interoperability with IRC networks, but I suspect that it won't hit critical mass until Discord starts causing problems for its userbase.
Maybe the DCC transfer and easy scriptabilty thanks to Khaled Mardam-Bey's mIRC might be a valid claim.
Perhaps also the impermanence of the history of the channels afforded certain types of interactions that you wouldn't do with you know, theoretically forever scrollbacks.
I guess this brings us back to classical marketing about how you can't have a sustainable differentiated product based on negatives. (as in, this is not the bad guy). You need to have something in the affirmative
1988 versus 1996 and 1997, respectively. AOL proper was an IRC competitor, as was CompuServe, but their definitions of working weren't different from IRC's.
That's not a useful comparison. The fact that IRC existed in 1988 does not bring a user onboard in 2004.
That same argument didn't save WAIS, Fido, or Gopher. Nor did it keep Tymnet or Bitnet around and didn't give Compuserve and The Well a seat at the winners table.
It also wasn't a saving grace for Friendster, MySpace, or LiveJournal.
Magnavox putting out the first home gaming console in 1972 hasn't made them a gaming juggernaut nor does Xerox run the desktop. Neither Palm, Go or IBM makes my smartphone nor is my laptop by Grid Compass, desktop by MITS, spreadsheet by VisiOn or my pants from Arnold Constable. I don't fly Western Air Express, drive a Rickett, subscribe to RealNetworks Rhapsody for music nor am I posting this on slashdot.org.
Citing an early creation date is a survivorship fallacy here.
The real question here is why didn't it die like everything else. Why is it one of the few legacy survivors?
> Citing an early creation date is a survivorship fallacy here
Separate problems: getting off the ground versus surviving.
IRC got off the ground because it didn't have centralized competition with a capability advantage. Why it persisted is a deeper story. Lemmy is still trying to get off the ground. It, unlike IRC, does have such competition. As such, the old playbook is obsolete.
I'm going to disagree. The old playbook is to empower users in unique ways that at the time feel almost forbidden and magical and to competently execute that.
You could claim all those avenues have been explored but I disagree there as well. The surrounding context and possibilities are always on the move so the underlying potential is always changing.
That's why say, YouTube, the 40th or so on-demand video company, which happened to launch when digital cameras and broadband internet were becoming widely used, was the first successful execution or why smartphones didn't take off until the rollout of 3G or, looking into the future, VR might finally take off at attempt 50 after some related thing changes.
Text only, transient/short life data, is a lot cheaper to process and serve than images, permanent posts, etc.
It won the initial buy-in of us geeks/nerds/hackers/whateverthephraseofthedayis who gave it a rather solid base.
It’s a very personal type of communication. Real-time, immediate, and to a lot smaller audience (more intimate) compared to web forums, Reddit etc.
And finally, I would posit that it did actually die. What remains now is small, compared to how popular the likes of Reddit Twitter etc are, vs how popular IRC was in its heyday.
This is an interesting question. Wikipedia claims 230,000 users at peak times which is still quite a bit more than say, gopher. A 98% drop is real but you'll still see IRC occasionally for software purposes (like say, Debian)
Maybe it was a coalition of people there for different purposes and some of those groups have fallen away for different places.
For instance, people were doing dating and sextalk on irc back in the day along with file-sharing. Those applications have been superseded by many other places. I don't expect to see anyone sincerely asking "a/s/l?" in modern IRC chatrooms.
You can join an XMPP MUC today to bring back that feeling and the server options are light enough to self-host on a home network unlike some other FOSS decentralized chat options.
I'm on a sort of global village irc server I found a link to in HN comments, and I keep in touch with a couple other sets of friends through efnet and private irc (with discord relay). It's dead relative to its hay day, but protocols never really die.
Nice thing about nostr is your account isn't tied to a server. The servers are just relays, and your messages are authenticated via pgp key. So your client will present you with a default set of servers, and if you need to change it later you don't need to recreate an account to do so, just tweak a setting.
The nostr community right now mostly want to replace twitter rather than reddit, but in principle it would be possible.
Agree with this. When I first hit Mastodon and Lemmy, I was hit with 'Join a server'. OK, but I want to at least start with one that's a 'main'server before I jump somewhere else. I can always splinter off later.
Now that I've been on Mastodon and Lemmy, it makes more sense, but this is a HUGE barrier to adoption.
Or to put it more generally, you have to look at your product or tool from the perspective of the laziest dumbest most unreasonable kind of people you want as the audience. You are not to complaint about how lazy they are, how dumb or how unreasonable, there are thousands just like them - shut up and do your job :-)
The mega pun is that if you are hard working, intelligent and reasonable this is going to be incredibly hard for you. You are going to need help from someone who is non of those things.
Multiple servers... Even on reddit I'd want a separate user for separate groups of subreddits... (at least for posting, for reading it could work as you describe, probably client could authenticate at one server, but connect to others to get the data). Just make sure that the client can support this cleanly/efficiently.
> These federated things need to be set up so that there's "no wrong door"
I would argue they are. Any of the servers will work fine. There needs to be a paradigm shift that only things that are centrally managed and have a profit motive are good.
Try Lemmy.world. Currently the fastest growing Lemmy server. It feels basically like any other social media site, like Hacker News or Reddit. I was using it, and seeing people post from other servers was pretty seamless and felt intuitive.
Honestly, I say this all the time but I think people just need to treat federation like it's email. The difference is that the "email threads" are public to all, rather than in your inbox.
It's not "drama", it's protecting their community from an instance that's currently being bombed by trolls.
Seriously, the concern trolling around here regarding federation is almost comical. Apparently when major private corporation admins or volunteer mods arbitrarily intervene in the functioning of a platform it's totally fine, but when local server admins do it by moderating locally or de-federating from problem instances (whether temporarily, to deal with a flashpoint problem, or permanently in the case of problem servers), suddenly it's a huge problem and an indication of "drama".
It's not concern trolling, drama exists because everyone gets distracted by organized trolling and federation stans don't have a good answer for this problem.
Federation is confusing and alienating to non-technical users, and nerds who love federation tend to have a mediocre grasp of social dynamics and gloss over the inevitable abuses. Federation stans need to grasp the fact that nobody who is not a full time nerd cares about how federation works at the technical level, they just want a place to socialize with the assurance that they won't be overrun by assholes. All the Federation stans go into it the idea that 'you can just defederate' whereas non-technical users go into it with the idea that they don't want to get raided in the first place.
The existing model of federation is not working. Users don't want to know about the infrastructure any more than people going into a coffee shop want to looka t the architectural blueprints of the building, and federation is clearly unable to pre-empt raiding behavior automatically.
Ordinary, non-posting users (lurkers) are not the target right now. The goal is to attract the creators: users who already put in tons of effort posting on Reddit. They are much more likely to put in the effort to grow new communities and migrate existing ones to lemmy.
If enough creators move over then the lurkers will follow. But attracting lurkers at this stage is pointless if there isn’t any content for them to look at.
"Raiding behavior" has been around forever, including on Usenet. It's not a serious objection to federation, since "raids" and other obnoxious behavior can happen irrespective of it.
I'm not objecting to federation as such, I'm objecting to the belief that users want to become federation evangelists in order to engage in social conversation. It's limiting the uptake of federated services because it forces users into making a meaningless-seeming choice before they can participate.
When I show a site like Lemmy to my non-technical friends, their eyes glaze over and they are confused by the necessity to choose an instance and the inability to make any kind of meaningful comparison between them. This is the exact same reason that Mastodon has never really taken off.
> When I show a site like Lemmy to my non-technical friends, their eyes glaze over
That's quite understandable actually, the Lemmy UX sucks. Try showing them fedibb.ml instead. It's Lemmy under the hood, and federation works perfectly - but you'd never guess that!
> Federation is confusing and alienating to non-technical users, and nerds who love federation tend to have a mediocre grasp of social dynamics and gloss over the inevitable abuses
> the concern trolling around here regarding federation
I clicked, excited. I closed the tab when it required me to select a server. I don't want to read up on what rights server admins have over my account, why I should choose one versus another, which servers are de-federating which others, et cetera.
This is a real and recurring hurdle to the adoption of these technologies.
> definitely better to blindly click through a ToS on some private corporate social media service
Philosophically, no. Practically, yes. Because it actually delivers the product. Creating an ideological and technical filter at the mouth of the funnel is absurd.
This is heading straight for either Reddit getting its act together or one of Facebook, Twitter or Substack taking the prize. Because they spent two seconds thinking about onboarding. Perfect is the enemy of good.
> Creating an ideological and technical filter at the mouth of the funnel is absurd.
So then just pick a large, popular instance and be done with it. You've already made it clear you don't care what the platform's policies are, so why are you pretending this is a barrier?
Why are you pretending that this isn't confusing to newbies? You are the archetypal technical person snapping about the workaround instead of engaging with the user problem. If everyone can have access to all the content (which is what most people want), why are they being herded into choosing an instance in the first place?
Federation might run 100x better if instances were suggested based on geographic proximity rather than semantics, a concept which makes intuitive sense to people. 'Pick from a random and inconsistent list of servers in no particular order' is like demanding that people who are considering taking a holiday decide where to eat lunch after they arrive before they buy the plane ticket.
> Why are you pretending that this isn't confusing to newbies?
I'm not. Absolutely the onboarding experience can be improved.
The problem is you're losing the plot, here.
The original commenter complained about having to "read up on what rights server admins have over my account, why I should choose one versus another, which servers are de-federating which others, et cetera."
But you don't have to do that if you don't want to. If you're already willing to blindly join Reddit, you can blindly join mastodon.social.
And the app is already now driving people to do that if they really don't care (which is what the OP claims).
So this is already being improved (and yes, can absolutely be improved further).
It's 'being improved' even though it's been identified as a problem from the outset of the fediverse, nearly a decade ago. I don't know how to make this any simpler:
Forced choices drive away users. People don't like making decisions without context because they feel like scams. That's why uptake is slow almost a decade into federation. The UX model is bad.
Picking a user name is a forced choice. By your logic, nobody would ever want to join a social media platform that didn't automatically assign a user name.
> pick a large, popular instance and be done with it
.world is having technical issues. (I could sign up. But first login spawns an infinite spinny. The only reason I know that's one of the larger servers is because of this thread.)
I'm doing it. But it's tedious, and the hacker in me sees an opening for a competitor to scoop out the 90% of users who don't care about federation, they just want it to work.
> you don't care what the platform's policies are, so why are you pretending this is a barrier
The problem is that there's no reason it won't end the same as Reddit if you don't have federation, so you actually can't scoop out 90% of users because they might as well stay on Reddit.
> there's no reason it won't end the same as Reddit if you don't have federation, so you actually can't scoop out 90% of users because they might as well stay on Reddit
It will end up like Reddit. But right now it isn't, and that's good enough to make a play for the users. Given a choice between that and choosing a server, signing up, finding its log-in unresponsive, looking for another server, signing up... (I haven't gotten further than this) who do you think wins?
By the way, we agree. I want a federated system to work. But simple sign-up fuck-ups, where even someone who's curious for curiosity's sake has to spend half an hour figuring out which servers even work at the moment,
I think we do largely agree here. However, I think it should be noted that the current migration is largely driven by moderators and power-users, not the 90% of users that don't really care, so I don't think there actually is any competitive opportunity.
I think that you're right in that the sign up UX is not great - there are also serious performance concerns, and in many ways the platform isn't ready yet. But I don't think that's going to persist for too long. I think some kind of "I don't care" instance (probably lemmy.world) will emerge, and the UX will improve. Perhaps it won't be in time, though.
> current migration is largely driven by moderators and power-users, not the 90% of users that don't really care, so I don't think there actually is any competitive opportunity
Power users' power is users. We've frequently seen the celebs-first gambit by new social media entrants, most notably Clubhouse, and while it can generate hype for a bit, it's far from a proven strategy. It's frustrating to watch a re-play of Mastodon's fumbles, particularly since this time the protest is actually semi-organized.
By power users, I'm referring to the small minority that generated the vast majority of content on Reddit. It's true that it isn't a proven strategy, but given that the Lemmy ecosystem has gotten around 100k users in the past 2-3 days, it's not failing as bad as it could be.
You say this as if it has not already proven to be a barrier. That is to say: it's already preventing adoption, whether you think it's a good reason or not.
You don't take an aeronautics course when you buy a plane ticket, because 99% of people don't want to do that. I've been a nerd for ~40 years, I used to live on Usenet, I understand federation inside out, and I don't want to learn another protocol just to try a new website.
Blindly clicking through a ToS while chuckling that 'nobody reads that shit lol' is in fact a better user experience for almost everyone. If your approach were so great, there would be physical cities whose population consisted entirely of architects and engineers.
>there would be physical cities whose population consisted entirely of architects and engineers.
the analog to a digital federation in the physical world, is literally just that, an actual federation. People making choices about what community they participate in isn't technical, it's social. Everyone who lives in a democratic society does in fact participate in how their city is run and governed or understands how to move from one state to another.
You do not need to understand the technical details of federated systems, but it is absolutely infantilizing to pretend that people are unable to choose or build the communities they want, and take some responsibility in maintaining them. This 'consumer' mentality needs to die, people need to learn to be proper citizens on the internet. We ask it from people in the real world, so we can do it online. Why are we pretending the online version of some 19th century company town is inevitable?
> You do not need to understand the technical details of federated systems, but it is absolutely infantilizing to pretend that people are unable to choose or build the communities they want, and take some responsibility in maintaining them.
Not only is it infantilizing, it's wrong.
People create communities online all the time. Whether it's Facebook groups or subreddits or Discourse forums or Discord groups and on and on and on. That's literally how the internet has always worked.
That's a good point. With those examples though I think being a member of multiple communities and discovering, joining, and leaving communities as desired is much lower friction compared to fediverse servers.
What you're missing is that there's no rhyme or reason tot he way the communities are presented when someone tries to join the fediverse, what the different standards are, how they're ordered, and so on. Of course we know that it's not a very important choice because people can just switch to a different server later, but to the average user it feels like they're having to lock themselves into something as a condition of participation, without any real idea of what they're getting into.
Going back to the Reddit example, it's easy to browse Reddit for [whatever]; when a person decides to create and account, they become part of the u/* supercommunity, and from there can start posting/voting in the particular subreddits that interest them. The fediverse does this backwards, equivalent to making people choose a default subreddit as a condition of becoming a user. It forces people to pick a home community which will shape their whole experience of the fediverse and how they will be perceived by other members of the fediverse before they have a chance to explore the system in a noncommital way.
it is absolutely infantilizing to pretend that people are unable to choose or build the communities they want, and take some responsibility in maintaining them
It takes time for people to figure out what communities they want to inhabit within a new protocol, which is why the perception of locking them into a single originating community is an antipattern. People don't necessarily want to be judged by their originating instance, because it reduces them to a one-dimensional caricature of themselves. You could join a general-purpose instance, but there are multiple general-purpose isntances, what makes one better that or differnt from another? There's no way to tell.
Critics of the fediverse model have been pointing out this rather obvious stumbling block since it was established, and fediverse stans just keep sticking their fingers in their ears going 'la la la can't hear you.'
This 'consumer' mentality needs to die, people need to learn to be proper citizens on the internet.
It has nothing to do wish consumption vs citizenship. You're demanding people tie themselves to a point of origin as a condition of existing in the fediverse, which is one of the worst aspects of meatspace. If you join a general server and then start participating in some niche topic (idk, fursuits), people in the niche instance are likely to write you off as a tourist. Conversely, if you decide to join a furry instance but then participate in discussions about sports, a lot of your interactions are going to consist of 'go away, furry weirdo'. You could create multiple acconts for your different interests, but now you have the headache of maintaining multiple accounts.
There just isn't a good reason to lock people into a particular instance in order to sign up. It's just reproducing nationality, a concept that many of us would like to dispense with altogether.
It's literally throwing thousands of babies out with bathwater. Beehaw in their attempt of building a happy place has disabled downvoting so community can't downvote trolls and only tool they apparently have to fight trolls is to defederate two of the biggest instances. Problem solved? It's like blocking entire small country by IP because your had two port scans from there.
If the federated system can't handle the trolls and bad actors that Reddit is currently equipped to deal with then the whole idea is dead in the water.
Yes. Joe Blow consumer just wants access to all the amazing free content on Reddit. Unfortunately, the people who create that content (1% of users) are currently getting screwed over by Reddit.
So my appeal to join lemmy is not aimed at Joe Blow, it’s aimed at the actual contributors who make communities possible. If enough of them switch over then lemmy will gain critical mass, and the rest is history. Joe Blow can go wherever he wants. I doubt he’ll stick around at Reddit when the content stream disappears.
> it’s aimed at the actual contributors who make communities possible
Contributors generally create content because they want it to be seen by more than a handful of nerds and don't want it to disappear within weeks because their instance has ran out of money.
Those contributors will either stop contributing for good, go back to Reddit (because it's still a better experience than any of the "fediverse" bullshit) or jump ship the second an actually competent company builds a centralized alternative that just works.
Look at the history of Mastodon. Contributors come in all shapes, but all of them want to be able to create without being harassed, insulted, mocked, trolled. Control over your means of communication is a mandatory step for that. Yes, your audience will be few. But few people listening to you in a wholesome way is miles better than masses barely seeing you, harassing you and overall not being heard. There's always someone who'll compare their audience on the fediverse vs twitter, and the conclusion remains: quality is better than quantity.
Funny, because if the US political discourse is to be believed, people, particularly on the right, really care about governance. I mean, hell, Musk bought Twitter specifically so he could change governance of the platform.
So no, I reject the premise.
People absolutely do care about governance. They care if they're getting spammed by crypto scammers or getting targeted by abusive trolls. They care if their political views are being censored or things they find offensive are being promoted.
The difference is, on a traditional, privately owned platform, the users have limited choice and no say, and they've gotten used to
that as the status quo.
And if you're a user who really doesn't care, cool, just join mastodon.social or lemmy.ml and move on. Problem solved.
As for complaints about onboarding, the official Mastodon app already drives people to mastodon.social (much to the chagrin of some folks in the community), so I have no doubt those issues will smooth out with time.
This seems like it could be solved by shifting the federation to the client. Let me choose which servers to subscribe to, and let my client merge comment threads when the same story is posted to multiple servers. And let me choose a mod team to filter stories and comments for me.
If the fediverse is like email, then filtering should happen on the client. It's not like I expect gmail to "defederate" an email server that's used by people I don't like. I expect it to facilitate my emails with anyone else, regardless of which mail server they use. And I want gmail to do some spam filtering for me, but I expect that I can see the filtered messages and show the filter what it missed or wrongly labeled as spam.
If we leave the federation up to the servers, we'll just get a "fragmentverse" of walled gardens instead of a single big one.
The difference is that email is a one-to-one medium, so it's easy to define spam. It's something the recipient doesn't want. Anyone who sends this or willingly serves users who do is unambiguously a malicious actor, so they get blocked.
With forums there are arbitrarily many recipients of any message. A lot of people may not like furries or communists or what have you, but demanding that every other instance ban them as a prerequisite to interoperability is how you kill the network by suppressing everything but the lowest common denominator.
This problem is created by tying accounts to instances. Because then other instances, instead of banning the accounts they don't want from only their own instance, can try to get them banned from everywhere by threatening any instance that allows them with disconnection. Which is poison.
> This problem is created by tying accounts to instances.
That's a huge issue. My identity should not be tied to anyone but me. This has to be one of the biggest things that scares (admittedly more knowledgeable than average) people off early when they're required to pick a server. Mastodon's "don't worry you can move servers later" is better but still not frictionless, and does not work unless your source server is still online.
Here's an even better version: all servers exchange everything, it's all text, properly managed the synchronization is efficient. Clients list topics and get full threaas with the assurance they have everything. Mods decide whether your story/comment respects the rules before allowing the post.
its a feature not a bug. calling that drama is disingenuous. They are protecting their own instance from trolls that they don't have the tools / resources to handle. Don't like that they de federated? then join a different instance.
Beehaw is moderated by 4 people. There was a wave of trolls from lemmy.world and one other instance, that doesn't restrict account creation. So, they decided to unfederate from those instances atleast as a temporary measure, until there are better moderation options.
I’m a technical person and I still don’t understand what federation is. I also read somewhere to treat it like email. What is like email? To who? I don’t understand how all the servers are interlinked and what it means to post from one server to another. Do I have identities on all the servers?
I can log into Mastodon and search and find the user I created on lemmy. I can also search, follow and look at the posts @technology@beehaw.org. All from my Mastodon app/account.
I think what we are seeing is a taste of what could be, as the technology improves and the UIs of the clients become more friendly and add features to leverage the tech.
We are watching it all happen in real time. Problem is everyone wants a polished experience day one. It’s going to turn a lot of people off, but I’m not sure there’s anyway around it. Once refined, this is the kind of tech could be key to the people controlling the future of social media.
> I can log into Mastodon and search and find the user I created on lemmy. I can also search, follow and look at the posts @technology@beehaw.org. All from my Mastodon app/account.
So is your user registered at lemmy? Or at lemmy.world? Is there a difference?
And you can view the posts at @technology@beehaw.org - but do you have to have a separate beehaw account to post?
Lemmy is the software that runs on all the servers. Lemmy.world and Beehaw are separately running that software. You make accounts on either server (just like you can make a Gmail account, or a Hotmail account), and do all the things with either account on either server.
Well, you could, but Beehaw basically blocked Lemmy.world. But otherwise the metaphor holds true. If you make an account on some other instance, you can subscribe to communities on Beehaw, post on Beehaw, and reply to users on Beehaw posts. When doing so your username, instead of being e.g. "mahogany", changes to "mahagony@[LEMMYSERVER]". That's how you can tell who is a user of that particular server.
It's kind of like email in the sense that I can email someone @gmail.com from @hotmail.com. As long as I have an email account on some server somewhere on the Internet I can email anyone else that also has an account on some server somewhere on the Internet, even if the accounts live on different servers.
The fediverse is set up kind of the same way. You can interact with people if you know how to find their account, the address of which is formatted similarly to an email address. You and whoever you're interacting with don't have to have accounts on the same server to communicate with each other.
When you make an account on one server, it doesn't duplicate that account to other servers. Each server is independent, but they can interact together.
It's like if you opened up a reddit thread while logged into your hacker news account, and decided to respond to a comment in the reddit thread. Federation would give you that ability. Your username, in that thread, would be something like "cdelsolar@news.ycombinator.com" or something like that, to show that you were posting from a different server.
The easiest way to think of it is a bunch of small reddits or twitters whose users can follow people on other small reddits or twitters. The defederation concerns are because being able to talk to people on other small twitters or reddits and not having things dictated from on high are the big selling points to most people.
You have an account on one server eg. foo@bar.com. People on example.com smallreddit will see you're posting from bar.com (ie. your username will look something like foo@bar.com). The bar.com server's UI may expose stuff from other servers to bar.com users, and the reverse.
Defederation means severing those visitation rights and other interop between two small twitters or two small reddits, something Mastodon servers use rather liberally.
In practice, what ends up happening is that at least Mastodon has hideous degrees of ideological conformity via defedding and general woke modding, and there's essentially standalone dissident "witches' covens" and an archipelago of servers whose maintainers tend to think different politics are de facto evil. I could hardly use the same account to see what progressives, gendercrits and various strands of the right are talking about the way I can on Twitter, for example, because of the defederation moats that have been erected.
That's why I recommended it as a Reddit alternative ;)
Nah, just kidding, it's a good point. But it's a good starter server, and once people get used to the idea, I think they'll naturally gravitate to other servers.
Yeah, or even Gopher. I would love an app that lets me run custom scrapers to fetch content, or post my comments to threads about that content, on whatever sites that one of my scrapers can read or post to with my account details. For example, an "NYT article fetcher" could implement the "content module" interface, to fetch an NYT article, remove the paywall, and render it for me. Then a "reddit fetcher" and an "HN fetcher" could implement the "discussion module" interface to fetch reddit and HN comments about the NYT article. And then the app could merge it all together into a nice unified interface, and give me tools for posting replies to Reddit or HN, or whatever sites are supported by my installed discussion modules and my locally saved credentials.
Let developers create each "source" of content or discussions, packaged into a module ("NYT article fetcher," or "Reddit discussion fetcher"), and let me choose which modules to install. Then delegate the infrastructure for executing scrapers or curating feeds to a set of federated servers that I can opt into. Or better yet, execute the scrapers in a local sandbox on my own device, so that the NYT can't block me because my requests are my own. You could argue it's just another form of a web browser.
> there's too much friction required to find their communities and aggregate them into a single usable feed with a nice client.
This is what old reddit did so well. You just open reddit.com and you see a dense wall of stories, along with vote count, number of comments on each story, and which subreddit that particular story came from.
All in ZERO clicks. No images or graphics at all, aside from little thumbnails you can easily ignore. Minimal, dense, and clutter-free.
Lemmy has already massively improved since I first encountered it a few years ago. There are so many more users and so much more activity. I expect the usability issues will be worked on and resolved in time. Without a corporation behind it or some way to meaningfully monetise it, process will be slow of course, and I'm not sure it could ever become mainstream in the same way that Reddit has.
In terms of discovery, there is a centralised community browser of sorts... but you'll see it's got quite a way to go: https://browse.feddit.de
However, as someone willing to put the time in to learn something new I've found my efforts rewarded. It does take longer than 10 seconds to get used to Lemmy and the fediverse, but I'd say no longer than 15-20 minutes really. I enjoy being part of something new and I hope it lasts. Perhaps it won't hang on to many of the new users it has gained, but I expect this won't be the last time Reddit does something its users don't like and next time around more will stick, hopefully presenting a very good alternative.
Exactly this. Lemmy looks like too much work if I'm being honest and none of the communities look that enticing. The reason reddit is popular is because it's easily accessible to the majority of people. I can't see a path to mass adoption here without a centralized source. I don't want to hunt for data, I want data presented to me.
What do you mean by "too much work"? I joined both lemmy.world and lemmy.ca yesterday (just to see how federation worked) and it was very quick and seamless. No more difficult than joining Reddit. You don't need to join multiple servers either, just one.
I don't want to look for data and join things. I don't have to do that on reddit. Overall I would say even with blackouts, reddit is still more interesting.
Yep. But I do genuinely think there is a path to adoption, not with a centralized source, but a centralized "sink" (the client). The "aggregation theory" model could apply here, and the Apollo/RIF apps have a unique opportunity to implement it, because they already have a loyal user base to bootstrap activity across whichever Lemmy backend(s) their users prefer.
Another feature that would help with bootstrapping would be something like a "Reddit bridge," i.e. a Lemmy instance that proxies requests to Reddit and allows you to authenticate your Reddit account so you can read it and post comments to it like any other Lemmy instance.
Or folks could learn how to do this stuff. Centralization due to "ease of use" is what got us into this mess, and keeps getting us into more walled gardens. At some point folks need to take some responsibility and learn how to setup and maintain their own shit.
It's endlessly fascinating to me - I basically assume that everyone here knows how to do computer stuff, at least at the enthusiast/power user level. Nobody at that level should have an issue with a system that requires a bit of extra configuration or a really, really tiny learning curve.
And yet, every single one of these fediverse discussions is full of people basically saying "This doesn't spoonfeed me with zero effort, I turned it off after ten seconds!"
I have had my Mastodon account since 2017, I posted once and then never really looked again, and then after Twitter imploded and people started using it, I came back. I was an active Twitter user at the time as well, and I just stuck with it for a while, but eventually I just quit using it because there was just no quality interaction on it at all, with people I agree with or otherwise.
I also had kind of a boring Masto feed at first, until I figured out to subscribe to hashtags, and now I have several quality conversations a day about things I'm interested in, with congenial strangers who are also just there to talk about cool stuff. You have to change your habits a bit, it's fine and it's better.
I have also identified a strong tendency in this forum to do very well-outlined explanations of what is difficult or inefficient about federation, but invariably, the problem they're describing exists in a much worse form on the silo'd alternative they are implying we should stick with.
I think you're making the mistake that just because people on the forum have the skills, knowledge, and general capacity to learn a new tool that they are convinced to put in the effort to learn the new tool. Social media specifically has thrived on a culture of extreme low effort to learn how to start having fun with it (think TikTok showing you cool videos, then an easy prompt to sign up, then an immediate "for you" page before you ever need to engage with the TikTok community like commenting, liking, following, etc).
The fediverse (and decentralized social media in general) breaks the mold of extreme ease of use and therefore subverts the cultural expectations, thereby violating one of the ways a user would establish if the application is "good", and thereby it looks "bad".
It's like, technically X algorithm is a superior algo to use. But I can import Algo Joe's library that's 50 years old and already integrated into every language I know, so I'll do Joe.Sort().
Perhaps low-effort users are part of the problems we're experiencing? I think maybe it's time to dial back the user-friendliness just a weeeny bit.
Anyways, I see zero evidence that Reddit will come back from this conflagration in any sort of good shape, and I see even less evidence that the VC business model is going to do any better with anything else.
Edit: Just sitting here thinking about this. Who exactly gets any benefit from low-effort users of a system?
The members of the community? Absolutely not.
The mods? F%@k no.
The site operator who makes money from attention. Get this guy out of the equation and we can have nice things again.
You seem to be assuming that everyone who doesn't want to jump through hoops at signup is a low-quality user. This seems like a very flawed (or pretentious?) view. "Low-quality users" are a subset of "users who don't want to jump through hoops at signup", but the subset is small in comparison to the superset.
Well, this one got a lot of response heat, I'm picking you to respond to.
Twitter is also the current textbook example of the problem with low-effort platforms that are controlled by capital. Like, do I even need to explain this to anyone? Are there still any Musk fanboys in the room who think he's playing 4d chess?
But while Twitter circles the drain and the world scrambles to figure out what to use instead, and Mastodon steps up as a competitor which cannot be seized and ruined by capital, ever, Reddit stands firm as the one true platform that got it right! Everyone gazes in awe at the one last hope for the capitalist internet, which seems to be doing just fine.
And Reddit looked over at Twitter, and then Reddit looked down like Rorschach, and said... "Hold my Over 8000 beers..."
You can’t just categorize people into being low-effort. Motivation is continuously changing, it is absolutely possible that someone will post an absolutely fascinating comment once they find that great unique context.
Also, reddit’s value is exactly that you have very different demographics on each subreddit, and “hearing the voice” of people is the whole point.
I actually don't disagree with your point. I'm merely explaining why fediverse-style platforms always get the complaint it sucks because it's harder to use than the centralized alternative, even among a community that should be used to such platforms.
Well that's what I'm saying. The backend doesn't need to be centralized. But you can avoid the need for the user to "learn this stuff" (which, like it or not, is undeniably a barrier to adoption), by "centralizing" the client (which can still be open source, with competing implementations that all connect to the same "fediverse"), in the sense that each user can have one app that connects to multiple backends for fetching and posting content.
And instead of relying on servers to federate with each other (which basically just shifts the problem, replacing one centralized walled garden with a patchwork of smaller gardens), why not let the client decide which servers to subscribe to? In an ideal world, the client could even merge comment threads when the same story is posted to multiple servers that the client subscribes to.
Centralization due to ease of use IS social media.
Without the centralization, why bother? Without the monolithic environments it's all private gardens. There's no point going and standing in someone's private garden while they're away.
It's seeking of the public square that is generating this situation, over and over and over again. This mess IS the territory. Either there's a way to have best of both worlds, or some kind of 'both worlds, in a compromised way', or this will always happen and this, too, is the territory: all public squares will be bombed for one reason or another until they're gone.
The whole point of federation is to connect these private gardens to each other. So you avoid the disadvantages of both (1) big centralized walled gardens that are not sustainable as "public squares" due to enshittification, and (2) tiny individual instances. This is very similar to how email and the Web work. It's why we use the internet nowadays instead of just dialing up to Compuserve.
I'm a technical user, I've spent last 3 days trying to figure out what should I really do to make a setup that I wouldn't want to nuke in a month (or a year). I'm still at loss how to get this deployed the right way (and not a lazy "install this in 5 minutes, feel the pains forever" way, thanks, my Matrix Synapse server is bad enough).
My current list of grievances:
- No standards of any kind on sharing the same identity, e.g. between Lemmy and Mastodon.
- No support for any distributed multi-master database (I'm currently trying to see if I can hack Lemmy to work with CockroachDB, but I'm probably going to give up).
The issue with Synapse is the same as I currently have with Lemmy - lack of HA. One particular machine goes down and the system is 100% unavailable. And most of my machines are hardware I own, located at homes (mine, parents, etc) in different countries, so they're slightly more prone to random power or uplink outages than AWS' us-east-1. Hobbyist-grade geo-distributed cluster, hah :)
I've solved this for my email (two mailhosts on different continents, Dovecot dsync replication for mailboxes) and my storage (Minio works, and I'm slowly experimenting with Tahoe-LAFS), but I haven't solved it for Matrix.
Dendrite supports distributed deployments and reportedly works with CockroachDB (albeit not officially supported). Not sure what Conduit supports (last time I've checked it was all about embedded databases like sqlite, rocksdb, sled and persy), but it has pluggable database backend architecture so when I'll finally decide I want to fix my stuff, I'd certainly check it out as well.
Solving active/backup HA for Matrix is pretty straightforward: postgres replication for the db and a shared filesystem for the media repo. When the primary postgres+synapse goes down, promote the secondary to primary, and continue.
We’re also working on account portability (MSC4014) that would eventually support active/active at the matrix layer, but it’s not ready tet.
PostgreSQL replication is hard for me. I know how to set up "classic" replication, but automatic failover and recovery that can solve split-brain issues is, sadly, not something I've figured out. And if it's not the machine, but the network that goes down (which happens few times a year on consumer-grade connections), it's a problem that happens in practice. I have learned how to repair nodes by hand, but I don't want to do this.
So far, I've managed to avoid thinking much of it by using distributed databases (CockroachDB and Consul, in particular) that already have all the magic built-in, so I just have to be careful with the settings.
Maybe I just need to learn how to deal with PostgreSQL...
postgres itself doesn't really do more than a leader/follower failover. There is always one source of truth: the leader, and whatever timestamp in the WAL they have written until. This is replicated to the follower. If the leader stops talking, the follower takes over. That's more or less it.
(if you have a third-party commercial PG extension with clustering, like EnterpriseDB or CitusDB, ask them, they'll tell you what they want you doing.)
there is no inherent clustering support in postgres. You can't scatter tables across servers/etc. It's not supported. Always one master server - if you need more storage you can use SAS/fibrechannel/etc of course but there is one postgres instance that's in charge.
All of the postgres replication idioms rely on that model: the WAL is reliable up to the point it's been received/verified. If you've faithfully played out the WAL throughout your existence, everyone's storage instance is at the exact same state and the only thing that matters is who's got the most recent timestamp from the host.
This also includes bringup strategies: if you have an atomically checksummed snapshot of the datasets (all storage, and pg_wal, at the same instant) then you can also spawn new nodes. ZFS can do that. And with an incremental copy-on-write you can replicate the base state, then replicate only the changes (which is much faster) and then fail over quickly. That's popular for other applications that don't have sophisticated ACID stuff, the higher-layer stuff at the PG app level probably makes more sense if it fits your usecase.
Anyway short version is, I'd think about a simple blue-green system (or round-robin system) where you can set an environment flag, and blue frontend nodes can simply choose to direct traffic to green backend's pgbouncer or similar when they see that. Then you flip web traffic over. Then you shut down the blue pg instance, and stuff fails over gracefully. The "healthy", "progressing", and "migrated" states, if that makes sense. And there is always one healthy node, even if you need to bring it up from backups. Yes, you have to look whether the other side is still healthy but that is now a k8s/pod problem and not an app one.
If you can live with an instance in the US and one in Europe or similar, and perhaps a few occasional seconds of "they're down?"/"i'm down?" failover downtime, a simple blue/green failover is probably easiest. Someone is master until they're down for 30+ seconds, the other server tries to notice failover failure and tests whether it's down to a couple canary servers via ping/etc, and if they realize they're offline still then they shoot themselves in the head and let the succession happen. As soon as any other server is aware a failover happened (header announcement from appserver instances) then shoot yourself in the head. It's just a "make sure there's no split brain" procedure, trading some availability. That's the tradeoff RDBMS makes, it's atomic/consistent and partition-proof, it's just not available.
Cassandra is a fantastic match for your problem though, especially if you can define availability zones ("I want each of these regions to be self available") but then you have to deal with split brain. And queues/kafka can potentially solve that if you want or can prove some lower bound on queue iteration position (globally or per-follower).
It's all about what parts of your system you want to be unreliable. Using signatures is an interesting crutch over "availability" though - proving a key was issued by a trusted server is fine, and you can propagate revocations (session and cert) relatively quickly and hopefully trust the revocation. And that cert tree doesn't require a lot of deterministic state, if your PKA structure can scale and issue certs regularly. Rolling server cert issue/revocation (as a liveness check) is an interesting model imo. It's all stateless but you can check that (short-term/ephemeral) cert X was actually signed by keyserver Y and cert X signed Z etc, but we know X was actually revoked at time T before that etc. That's always seemed like a reasonably decent "best-effort" propagation, have stuff like revocation handled through redis sync/etc and just check the state for inconsistencies with the known state of the world.
If you're looking for a straight up reddit alternative in all its scope, I can see it being an issue, but if we simply want a better iteration, then isn't one more catered to technical users, perhaps be a good thing?
To me this feels similar to windows vs linux. The pains you describe in learning to use lemmy reminds me of windows users who complain about linux not being exactly like windows, UI wise.
But for users like me, after having un-learned windows and customized my linux experience, the result is just downright better from any angle. Yes, it was a time investment learning the ropes, but it was worth it.
Perhaps the modern approach is to stop trying to be like the most populist standard, and embrace platforms that are midway between the social giants and obscure niches.
That depends on whether you consider a community that's missing all non-technical voices to be "better." By contrast, operating systems are an individual choice with individual impact.
That is a fair point, but as a thought experiment, I can't really say. I just think the immediate assumption that you need those non-technical voices should be reconsidered.
Average internet user thinks Bill Gates has a robot arm with vaccine-delivering microdart shooters and if you shake his hand you'll have Windows 11 installed directly to your nervous system.
Actually. The average internet user would think himself pretty smart repeating low effort strawmen like yours while repeating heavily propagandized mantras such as "It's safe and effective" and "It's just 2 weeks! Can't you just stay put for 2 weeks?"
Same, but thanks to some of the replies to your post it makes sense to me now.
Thing is I _still_ closed the tab and will likely forget about it. Turns out that thousands of people posting nothing but complaints about "REDDIT EVIL", isn't that interesting to read.
> I did manage to find a community by clicking "join," and arbitrarily picking one of the communities on the page (which were presented in random order on every page load). I was disoriented and didn't know what this community was
Well, to be honest, that part does sound exactly like reddit.
But people fall on reddit by links to a public page somewhere, avoiding the empty page problem. After a short time on their site, I still don't know if I can link to a comment in Lemmy or if I can browse a community.
And edit: yes, each one of those servers has a web interface at their root that you can browse and link to. The link being name "join" doesn't make it obvious.
Federated services will never become mainstream. This is just the reality that people need to come to accept. I find them heavily talked about in circles with my colleagues and in my profession but the attraction of decentralized services just isn't there for the vast majority of people.
I find Lemmy frustrating to use and it isn't just growing pains: it's the same reason I find Mastodon frustrating. Do I care if username@somecommunity.infosec.somecommunity matters? Do I care if I use lemmy.world or do I have to find some server? Which server?
Centralization works. It's convenient. It doesn't require a user guide. It's approachable for laypersons.
This is just the reality. I wish people would focus on building services that meet peoples needs and not just as an expression of their idealogies.
Mastadon, Lemmy, Etc, they're not replacements for Reddit or Facebook. They're an alternative.
A social network doesn't require millions of users to be useful. It's okay that they're not for everyone.
> Centralization works. It's convenient. It doesn't require a user guide. It's approachable for laypersons.
For a technically inclined person on a largely technology focused forum, you sound an awful lot like a luddite.
There used to be a high barrier to entry for accessing the internet and making use of it. That changed over time. The same will likely happen for these types of non-centralised services.
I'm not sure if this is meant to be some kind of childish insult or gotcha but no: I'm talking in representation of luddites.
> A social network doesn't require millions of users to be useful. It's okay that they're not for everyone.
That might be true if you only ever want to read technical things with a technical audience in a technical forum. But that's not why Reddit is valuable or popular. Lemmy is an alternative to Reddit like water is an alternative to beer. Sure, they exist in the same kind of universe, but no sane person would tell you to switch from water to beer because they don't meet the same needs.
Reddit is popular because I can read /r/netsec one day and /r/lawncare the next. Because when I wanted to learn to make my own coffee at home I knew I could just go to /r/espresso and get a 101. When my 3D printer broke, I knew I could go to /r/bambulab and ask for help. When the historic winter we just had in NorCal ripped shingles off my roof, I knew I could go to /r/roofing to ask for advice.
Sure, you might want to live in a world where you only talk to software engineers about software and maybe Lemmy is a good fit for that.
> I'm not sure if this is meant to be some kind of childish insult or gotcha but no: I'm talking in representation of luddites.
No, it's an observation.
You're insisting things have to work a certain way in order for them to have value and be usable. Things don't have to operate in a specific, fixed way.
Saying decentralisation will never catch on because it doesn't fit your description of accessibility is like saying someone won't be able to operate in society without knowing how to read or write cursive.
Things change. How people learn about stuff, how they use technologies, how they think about them, it all changes. It was once a widely shared opinion that computers would never catch on. Or that the internet wouldn't catch on. Or any other number of things wouldn't catch on. And they did, despite anyone's objections that it would.
As people's mindsets change, as technology advances, so will how it's used. And you don't seem to be open to that idea. Hence the luddite comparison.
> You're insisting things have to work a certain way in order for them to have value and be usable. Things don't have to operate in a specific, fixed way.
No, I'm not. I'm staying on the topic of the thread you're posting in: Reddit's future and where people may or may not migrate to. You're doing exactly what I accused the creators of Fediverse technologies are doing: fixating on the ideology and taking an opportunity to preach.
I see the value of the Fediverse. I see the intent. I understand it. It's not complex.
But it isn't a replacement for Reddit. I don't even think you're arguing that. I think you're trying to get me to debate some strawman. I never said the Fediverse has no value. I said it has no mainstream appeal so long as people prioritize the ideology of the technology over the use case.
> Things change. How people learn about stuff, how they use technologies, how they think about them, it all changes. It was once a widely shared opinion that computers would never catch on. Or that the internet wouldn't catch on. Or any other number of things wouldn't catch on. And they did, despite anyone's objections that it would.
This is an argument that things _can_ change not that things _will_ change. Plenty of things never caught on. On that note, Diaspora existed as a widely available alternative to Digg when Digg died.
> Centralization works... It's approachable for laypersons.
You are arguing that things will not change because it doesn't work in a very specific way. I'm replying to what you said. This isn't a straw man argument.
There doesn't need to be a direct replacement for Reddit. Things don't have to continue to work like that. Your assumption of what's difficult to do isn't an absolute. People have shown they're able to adopt new ideas, new ways of doing things.
> I'm talking in representation of luddites.
You're not giving enough credit to society. They're not cattle. They don't just sit in a field and chew cud.
Mindsets and ideologies change. How technology is used changes. Your insistence that there has to be a direct, fully equivalent replacement for Reddit to be successful is incorrect.
I'd take a wager that we'll see Digg 3.0/Reddit 2.0 before we'll see widespread adoption of the Fediverse.
I don't think people are cattle and I think that is a deliberate attempt to misrepresent my position. I don't think people are cattle. I think they are anything but: I think they have made a conscious decision about what they want and value.
What I think is that people have become accustomed to having a wide array of information on a wide array of topics easily indexed and accessible. What I think is that people value that accessibility of information. And I think that products like Lemmy don't meet that requirement and so something like Reddit will always exist, regardless of the centralized corporate ownership.
> I don't think people are cattle and I think that is a deliberate attempt to misrepresent my position.
I'm not attempting to misrepresent you, that's just how you're coming across. You're effectively saying that people are either too lazy or not competent enough to use services that aren't packaged up and served directly to them. Hence the analogy.
> something like Reddit will always exist, regardless of the centralized corporate ownership.
Maybe, but that's not the point. You're claiming that decentralised services won't see wide spread adoption because it doesn't conform to how things work on Reddit. My point is it's narrow minded to have that mindset.
> You're claiming that decentralised services won't see wide spread adoption because it doesn't conform to how things work on Reddit.
That is explicitly not what I said. What I said was:
> What I think is that people have become accustomed to having a wide array of information on a wide array of topics easily indexed and accessible. What I think is that people value that accessibility of information.
A replacement doesn't have to work how Reddit works. It just has to provide some of the same value.
The following are your words, not mine, although the emphasis is:
> > Federated services will never become mainstream. This is just the reality that people need to come to accept. I find them heavily talked about in circles with my colleagues and in my profession but the attraction of decentralized services just isn't there for the vast majority of people.
> > I'd take a wager that we'll see Digg 3.0/Reddit 2.0 before we'll see widespread adoption of the Fediverse.
Those two points are not contrary. The quote you pasted does not dispute my point at all. Your emphasis is my point that the fact that the service is decentralized does not allow it to make up for the fact that it does not meet the needs of the users.
It does for some people -- some people value the fact that it's decentralized over other needs -- but my point is the vast majority of people don't care as long as the information they need is there and accessible. The fact that it's decentralized is, in itself, not enough.
EDIT: And to be clear: I think the fact that it's decentralized doesn't preclude it from having those other properties that users value just that the developers of Fediverse applications don't seem to realize that they need to do something more than make it decentralized. That's the entire essence of my post.
> And to be clear: I think the fact that it's decentralized doesn't preclude it from having those other properties that users value
And yet:
> > Federated services will never become mainstream. This is just the reality that people need to come to accept
> > Centralization works. It's convenient. It doesn't require a user guide. It's approachable for laypersons. This is just the reality
> > Lemmy is an alternative to Reddit like water is an alternative to beer. Sure, they exist in the same kind of universe, but no sane person would tell you to switch from water to beer because they don't meet the same needs.
And then there's this:
> > I find Lemmy frustrating to use and it isn't just growing pains: it's the same reason I find Mastodon frustrating. Do I care if username@somecommunity.infosec.somecommunity matters? Do I care if I use lemmy.world or do I have to find some server? Which server?
> > I see the value of the Fediverse. I see the intent. I understand it. It's not complex.
Which one is it? Complex or not? Do you need a user guide? No? Which one?
You're all over the place. Saying centralisation is required for mainstream adoption which means decentralisation isn't, but somehow decentralisation isn't the problem that the fediverse has?
One thing that I haven't pointed out in all of this is that signing up and using reddit might have been easy for you, but that isn't the case for every body. I'd wager for most visitors to reddit, whether or not they have registered an account, they simply consume the content there like they would a Facebook wall. Many users don't understand the concept of subreddits or fine tuning their account to their interests. They aren't getting the same value out of it that you place so highly on it.
Centralization does not necessarily make things user friendly. Nor does decentralisation make things less user friendly. You have implied both to be true and then contradicted yourself.
I'm not all over the place. You're just exactly the frustrating personality type I'm talking about: one who is hyperfixated on the technology and the decentralized nature who can't see the forest for the trees and is more interested in arguing the minutia.
I'm content in my belief that we won't see a mass adopted Fediverse technology replace Reddit in my lifetime. I think theres a variety of reasons for this but the people involved in the development and advocacy of the products and their inability to listen to any feedback are the biggest one. They think they've got this _allllll_ figured out and it's just humanity that needs to evolve to meet them.
I'll come back here and apologise if I'm wrong. I don't see that happening, though.
> You're just exactly the frustrating personality type I'm talking about: one who is hyperfixated on the technology...
If anyone here has been hyper fixated on technology it's you. I haven't been heralding the Fediverse. I haven't been waxing poetic about decentralisation. I've only been responding to the things you've said about how the centralised nature of Reddit is why it's successful and that decentralisation will never successful, which is something you said.
> > Federated services will never become mainstream.
As for this:
> I'm content in my belief that we won't see a mass adopted Fediverse technology replace Reddit in my lifetime. I think theres a variety of reasons for this but the people involved in the development and advocacy of the products and their inability to listen to any feedback are the biggest one. They think they've got this _allllll_ figured out and it's just humanity that needs to evolve to meet them.
It's not like those products can't evolve. The developers and communities behind these products can, and most likely will, do things to help with adoption of the services they've created. This isn't like the book of Genesis. Just like how some deity didn't create the earth in six days and then rested it's not like new features won't be added or different federated offerings won't appear.
> I'll come back here and apologise if I'm wrong. I don't see that happening, though.
Nah, that's okay. It's just a chat on a web forum. I imagine we'll both forget about it in a few days.
> It's not like those products can't evolve. The developers and communities behind these products can, and most likely will, do things to help with adoption of the services they've created. This isn't like the book of Genesis. Just like how some deity didn't create the earth in six days and then rested it's not like new features won't be added or different federated offerings won't appear.
The _entire_ point of my first post was my finishing sentence:
> I wish people would focus on building services that meet peoples needs and not just as an expression of their ideologies.
Put more plainly: these services have been around for a decade (diaspora* was a viable alternative to Digg before Reddit) without meaningful adoption _or_ evolution in spite of that lack of adoption. I surmise it's because the folks developing them are more interested in the ideologies than building communities.
Obviously they can change. Obviously they can become a better fit with a bigger focus on UX. But they haven't in the last decade and I'm not seeing any indication they will this one, either.
>There used to be a high barrier to entry for accessing the internet and making use of it.
While this was a bit before my time, I can definitely relate to spending hours or days to get something to work that I want to use. I think the difference is just that all the fediverse services don't really seem all that useful. If I open the frontpage of any "reddit alternative" right now, the top posts have a few hundred votes and a few dozen comments at most. There is simply too little activity here (that I care about) that would make it worth it for me to really get into it. I browsed reddit for entertainment and discussions and right now, none of the fediverse services I've looked at actually provide that.
Centralization works. It's convenient. It doesn't require a user guide. It's approachable for laypersons.
It works until it doesn’t: when the host of a centralized community decides to make enemies with its users. This is an old story for many people who went through the Digg to Reddit migration.
Now people have had enough. Our communities are too important to leave in the hands of one company. It’s time for all the people who create 100% of the value on Reddit to have control over their own community’s future.
> It works until it doesn’t: when the host of a centralized community decides to make enemies with its users.
And yet in spite of this very thing happening, Lemmy and Mastodon remain largely unadopted.
Diaspora* existed during the Digg implosion and where did people flock to? No, not the decentralized Fediverse, but to another centralized service. Because it meets their needs. Their needs from a product _aren't_ that it be decentralized. Their needs are that it is easily accessible, that information is easily indexed and searchable, that interacting with users is obvious and transparent, etc.
These are all needs that Fediverse products have not met well because they're too focused on their agenda and their ideology, not their product.
I'm with you 100% on the goal here, what fediverse skeptics like me keep trying to point out is that it's not going to work if you first require every user to learn nerd stuff. Most people are part of multiple communities, some which overlap and some which do not. The whole process of choosing an instance in order to figure out the fediverse is broken, because it assumes people one-dimensional, and forces them into making a fundamentally meaningless choice as their first user experience.
It's based on a metaphor of the body in a physical place, that doesn't really work online. As I mentioned in another comment, this is like offering to give someone a ticket to an exciting foreign city, but before they can get the ticket they have to choose where they're going to eat lunch when they arrive. This alienates people because they have no context for choosing between instances so forcing this choice on them as a condition of signing up is good way to maximize your bounce rate.
Some people have had enough. People are still using Reddit despite the blackouts. We'll see how much mass migration there is. Even if Reddit goes the route of Digg, how do you know another centralized site won't take it's place?
> I wish people would focus on building services that meet peoples needs
No what you are presenting is an argument for services that meet the needs of dumbest assumable users and centralization. It's the same unreflected argument as has been repeated over and over when it comes to Mastodon and it boils down to "everyone needs to be there or else it's a failure". Services like that obviously are fine too, but there is more than enough people that don't need or want that.
It speaks for a certain narrow mindedness that everything needs to be Silicon Valley's next big thing that will someday rock the stock market.
In reality Mastodon does not have the size of Twitter, and you might find it too difficult to use. However not everyone is that way, and it has over the last months proven to be a good alternative for users. It's potentially the same with Lemmy: It only needs to povide a cool alternative and enough users for meaningful interaction.
It does not need the popularity of reddit to be valid. And it does not need to be designed explicitly for the layperson. (not an excuse for a bad UI, but with new Reddit the bar is incredibly low there, and Lemmy seems fine)
> I find Lemmy frustrating to use
Well others don't, and that is fine. For me personally: not everyone needs to migrate to Lemmy (or another federated alternative), only the communities I care about. And the same can be true for other people as well.
It's ironic that I posted "federated services are difficult to engage with because the people designing and advocating for them are more interested in ramming an ideology down your throat and condescending you than they are providing a service" and a bunch of people responded by ramming their ideology down my throat and condescending me.
Yes, I acknowledge that not every service needs to be a mega service that everyone flocks to. Yes, I acknowledge that multiple products can exist than when combined replace a prior, larger service. Yes, I acknowledge that Lemmy, Mastodon, Diaspora or whatever else you like is great and fine for you and I'm happy for you and that's OK.
No, I don't think any of these services will realistically replace Reddit and I think that if Reddit dies then Digg 3.0 will spring up in it's place.
> It does not need the popularity of reddit to be valid.
I never said it was invalid. This isn't an attack on the technology. It's OK. You can calm down. It's my opinion that it isn't a drop-in replacement for Reddit and unlikely to see widespread adoption or prevent another Reddit from appearing.
It's like talking to Web3 zealots. I'm not attacking you, I promise.
> And it does not need to be designed explicitly for the layperson.
It does if it wants to be as useful as Reddit is today and Digg was before it or achieve the same popularity. You argue that we don't need a single service to be popular and that's OK but I live in reality.
You're comparing apples and oranges. You acknowledge that Lemmy does not attempt to be everything Reddit is today. I'm suggesting that that leaves a gap and people are interested in that gap.
People have become accustumed to having a single location to visit to obtain a depth of knowledge on a wide breadth of topics. I don't think, and I think you acknowledge, that Lemmy attempts to fill that need. And thus something like Reddit 2.0/Digg 3.0 will always exist.
Take a step back. What is social media achieving in its current state. If you only look at the shiny cat videos and dances and memes, that's not the purpose. The purpose is the mass collection of data.
If your only standard of "is working" is "it's what the majority uses", then yes, "it works". But do you really want that to be your standard? Just number of users, at any cost?
If you're competing against algorithms fine tuned to make people pretty much addicted, do you really want to play the same game? And is this mindset not fueled by ideology as well?
If you think Reddit is social media in the same sense that Facebook is then I think we're coming at this from very difficult angles.
Reddit is more akin to Wikipedia than it is to Facebook at this point for many people. Yes, much of the popularity comes from interacting with others but it's also become a hive of up-to-date information and opinions for hobbies, for trades, etc.
If I start a new hobby I don't need to go find the 10 year old abandoned page or the SEO manipulated AI generated summary. I just go to /r/hobby. New espresso machine? /r/espresso. I want to know what 3d printer to buy? /r/3dprinters. Damage to my roof? /r/roofing. I don't know how to do some maintenance on my house? /r/homeowners. I need to buy a new car but I don't know how to get a good deal? /r/askcarsales.
There's a lot more at play here than the stale "social media bad, algorithms manipulate society" take.
I would say that reddit’s value is simply being a mostly text-based forum with a big user base, good model for discussions and good moderation (as in, it efficiently removes spam. Surely several mods are very problematic in their power grabs).
I hate facebook with a burning passion, but on “ultra niche groups” front it can actually be surprisingly good. What most big social media networks lack though is the very simple upvote-downvote mechanics, and proper comment trees. That enables reddit (and Hn also) to have truly great discussions from time to time. Facebook instead optimizes for rage by showing the shittiest possible take at front and no amount of explanation could de”platform” a low effort take under a news article for example.
While reddit is not immune to that, you will often find a great comment chain within the top 3 ones that calls out the stupid takes and actually has proper factual knowledge.
Works for email. There are only a few big hosts and some larger-but-not-huge number of mid-sized ones, sure, but they all play nicely with one another. Like if you could post on Twitter from your Facebook account.
Of course, I doubt we could create email today, if it didn't already exist.
Email works because despite it's decentralized nature, it's functionally transparent to the user and you aren't constantly forced to acknowledge that nature.
The issue with "Fediverse" technologies is not dissimilar from crypto: it's designers care more about the ideology and the concept of being in the fediverse than they do meeting an actual product need.
In spite of a _dire_ gap in the market place and a substantial marketing opportunity to pick up market share, Lemmy and Mastodon remain largely unadopted by the masses and will likely remain in a similar market place as Diaspora*.
> Email works because despite it's decentralized nature, it's functionally transparent to the user and you aren't constantly forced to acknowledge that nature.
You are forced to, every time you have to write the bit after the @ in an email address, though!
> The issue with "Fediverse" technologies is not dissimilar from crypto: it's designers care more about the ideology and the concept of being in the fediverse than they do meeting an actual product need.
I think the trouble is that they're still trying to be too centralized(!) and keep too much control over content on the side of the various federated servers. Email defers to the client far more than these systems do. Gmail's not going to cut off "federation" with @microsoft.com because some of its users are sending solicited racist newsletters and MS refuses to ban them, for instance (if they become a spam farm and a huge proportion of Gmail's users complain about it? Yeah, then, maybe). Fastmail probably won't ban you because you're receiving racist newsletters. There aren't content moderators, just mostly-automated responses to user reports of abuse. The user is in control, and the servers don't try to proactively police or curate content that users want to read (they filter spam, sure).
(I mean, there's the further problem that it's nearly impossible to create a new open protocol of any kind and get any notable adoption these days, but that's not the fault of the federated model)
[EDIT] To be clear, I'm not advocating for racist newsletters in the above, that was just an unambiguous example of the kind of thing that'll draw swift and harsh moderator action on a lot of federated servers but that can (I assume—admittedly, I've not tried) get passed around via email without problems—my point is that the issues with "drama" and network-churn and such in federated networks, that may disrupt the usage patterns of ordinary users, is connected to how much control the server operators have. More fundamentally, this is connected to making the activity of these communities public on the Web by default—which I think is largely a mistake, I think it's really weird that it's become common for groups of people chatting about whatever to put everything they say on billboards in flashing lights all around the world.
Personally, I think it's interesting to see federated services get put through the ringer as possible alternatives. Lately there's been a perfect storm of entitlement from corporations (i.e. Twitter and Reddit) over their userbase that is great to see funneled into a stress test for federated alternatives.
I have the same opinion. Having to choose a server is a significant hassle. Some servers specialize in one area, while others specialize in another. They "can" federate to some extent, but it is insufficient. The only thing that would eventually work is something that behaved like a centralized service. Similar to IPFS. You have a link, and it downloads from wherever server it is located on.
Yes, I just saw the r/StarTrek migration, and visited Lemmy for the 3rd time or so this week, and quite frankly, I could drop reddit entirely now, if I knew how to find communities. I feel some real hacker/dev excitement for the future of Lemmy.
Also, you can go to https://browse.feddit.de/ and find communities. If they're not available on your lemmy instance, you can copy+paste the URL into your lemmy instance's search field and as long as it's not blocked by the instance it will be federated from then on.
It's not the best experience and it's not obvious or intuitive. A browser extension could simplify it substantially, at least. As could new features in lemmy itself, but you want to be careful about every lemmy instance consuming the content from every other one, as that won't scale easily for the average lemmy admin.
If anyone is wondering it’s still not quite perfect as some instances have inadvertently blocked federation while they deal with growth. It should work itself out once the dust settles
This is the biggest source of friction for Lemmy and the Fediverse. Non-tech savvy folks will not make the shift if it is such a pain to find the communities you want to join.
Adoption cycles are older than dirt. Only the innovators have to go alone, and they have a thick skin and a romantic notion of adventure. Just wait for someone to point out the new thing, and you can still be an early adopter. You can join in telling the late adopters that this forum is not appropriate for your peripherally related topic and you should post your question in X.
When feed readers worked for me, which was all the way back when Slashdot was in its early phase of decline, I would keep tabs on the domain named for the threads I got engaged in, and if I saw a pattern I’d go look for an RSS link, and then sometimes I got to be the one to post the interesting article.
I’m hoping Lemmy has a cross posting function that will serve a similar use case. You start in a woodworking forum here and someone reveals the DIWhy forum to you organically. After six to twelve months you have your hands full.
Other than the "not a lot is happening there now", but there's some activity.
The most recent posts on the server I'm on:
The Lower Decks crossover to live action in Strange New Worlds
Star Trek Discovery Canceled
‘Galaxy Quest’ TV Series in Early Development at Paramount+
Jack Crusher is how old?
Star Trek The Lower Decks S03E09 was everything I wanted.
(spam - into the kill file that poster went)
TOS Film marathon
(crossposted trolling - more kill file material)
Captain Burnham mob/cops/big city episodes (Star Trek Discovery)
(crossposted trolling - figured out how to do more complicated rules - "cross posted to more than 3 groups and newsgroups match \.politics\." with this reader)
(crossposted trolling - even more kill file material)
Ode to Spot. (this post is from 2012)
When will the new Star Trek merge with the Twilight movies? (this post is from (2011)
No emoji. No reaction gifs. No memes.
Just text content.
edit: and as I write this, a new post just showed up in the past 2 minutes about Strange New Words S02E01.
So none of the things many people like. I loved usenet back int he 1990s, but the refusal to adapt to what users like to do is a large part of what killed it.
I just use the communities tab [0], that's on every instance. Then select All to get a list of all communities federated with this instance sorted by size.
Other wise I just, use the search bar. I just tested it with the goal of finding a photography related community. Found it with the first search result from "photography". [1]
Another example, I wanted to find a risc-v related community, one simple search [2], boom, I found one [3]
Try a different server, ideally one closer to you. Lemmy.world is currently the most popular server (located in Finland) which has seen the largest influx.
Here's a big list of servers (and their countries) sorted by MAU [1]. Note that the MAU data is out-of-date now that there's been a huge spike in the past few days.
If I were a smart man, and that seems to depend on the day of the week, I’d put the services that can swamp the whole system on a separate VM that’s resource constrained so it has its own back pressure built in.
It’s possible you’re seeing a bug, and it’s also possible that The System is Working.
I can tell you that the login link takes me to a form on Safari. When did tech people stop stating which browser they’re using and what quirky tools they have installed?
It's a bit confusing because it doesn't notify you that a verification email has been sent when you sign up. If you've already checked your email maybe try the spam folder.
I'm the head mod of a pretty big subreddit, /r/3Dprinting, with 7 million views a month and 1.8 million subscribers. At the beginning of this I set up a lemmy instance at https://rhombik.com and linked to it from that subreddit. From the roughly 150k uniques per day we had on /r/3Dprinting zero of them have tried the lemmy instance.
Perhaps setting up your own instance for a single community is the wrong approach. You're basically hosting an entire Reddit for a single subreddit. It probably hurts discoverability a bit.
There are already 3D printing communities on Lemmy.
Lemmy.ml wasn't accepting new users at the time. This server has 200GB of ram, plenty of space. I do also try to connect people to lemmy in general but it's challenging when the "main instance" isn't accepting new users.
The crux of the problem right here. Modding is ultimately a power trip, and no mod wants to give up their power. A "head mod" of a popular subreddit wouldn't just join a random lemmy where they can't assert their power.
I’m a mod for a 1.5mill sub community and I’d gladly drop it! The only thing I care about is the community being able to move somewhere where we can continue to have interesting discussions about the thing our sub is dedicated to. I could not care less about continuing to be a mod. I only do it at this point because the community is awesome and I still learn a ton there.
Speaking for myself here, I hate the Lemmy user interface.. do I really need lots of wasted screen space on the left and right sides of my screen? I also have issues with the expanded line spacing.. I have never liked reading text that is 1.5-3 spaced instead of single-spaced.. the colours they choose and the text size are also issues for me. I don't like white text on a grey background for example.
Lemmy as a user interface is not well designed. It wasn't made to be read on a web browser in a monitor. It was made to be read on a small smartphone screen.
I'm pretty active in r/3DPrinting and r/FixMyPrint, and strongly support the blackout. I've been avoiding Reddit entirely and getting my news from other sources, while also exploring the fediverse. I had no idea about the rhombik instance/magazine/whatever.
The core problem with the migration is that the information on where to go EXACTLY is hosted on the platform being boycotted. I decided to not visit Reddit anymore and watch for instances to pop up on the fediverse. If others do the same, the migration will be slow. Don't be discouraged if it takes a few days to pick up steam. There's another 3DPrinting magazine that has some users already. https://kbin.social/m/3dprinting@lemmy.world or https://lemmy.world/c/3dprinting
That leads to the second problem of on-boarding migrating users to a highly distributed platform. I've mentioned in the boycott server the need for "racks" (the subjects within instances are called magazines, this would be a collection). These would be moderated aggregators of instances, like the invisible step between lots of disparate subreddits. There would be no limit of the number of racks, so technically you could have a permutation of every associated magazine-instance combination. The purpose would be to have a single link new users can click on to get subscribed to a set of magazines all at once, basically making the federation concept seamless to less technical users while still highly flexible on the backend. I'm going to shoot the suggestion up the chain for kbin.
That leads to the third problem, which is all these alternatives are new and going through growing pains. Trying to add features comes second to keeping the service stable. I'm hoping others with more coding experience can assist kbin devs.
And I wanted to mention that last I heard (and saw evidence of), some of the main Lemmy devs were kinda garbage people (Tiananmen Square massacre supporters, not just questionable opinions on government). The more controversial instances have been defederated from the primary/intake server, but it's still worth mentioning. Kbin doesn't have that baggage, but there are only a couple devs, and really only one main dev, last I heard.
Kbin users can see and respond to Lemmy and Mastodon instances that are federated, so it has been the migration choice for most of the Reddit boycott groups.
edit: btw - I just looked at the comments on the one post. If you want to run a poll, fine, but most of the people protesting won't be there to vote. I thought the 3D printing subs were largely positive and supporting, if those comments represent the community I was supporting, I now have zero qualms about deleting my comments on Reddit.
Internet search is fundamentally broken now due to perverse incentives and game theory. I won’t say we are “going back to the Before Times” because that’s not accurate, but we need to go back to the In-between Times when you searched for new-to-you ideas and found curated communities that had depth of experience.
It’s possible that google is overtrained, that it got too good at finding things in the structures of the Internet (see: PageRank), and that structure collapsed because we have Google for that now, so why bother? And then Google couldn’t tell the Pulp from the Real, and SEO became far too powerful. I doubt that’s what happened, but I can’t rule it out.
In some of my hobbies, Co-ops are a powerful force for good (or at the very least, mediocrity++). These federations are just a fancy word for Co-op, IMO. If I can’t have Good, I’ll settle for mediocrity++ over mediocrity—-, which is the precipice we stand on with Reddit current events.
BeeHaw just defederated from sh.itjust.works and lemmy.world.
A poster came onto sh.itjust.works claiming responsibility for that. They described the very minor trolling they used to achieve it. They say they work for Reddit and are personally invested in proving that federation is impossible.
So hey, it's the internet, assume everything in that is a lie, but it shows that there's emotional resonance in the idea of preventing this shift.
There are a lot of malcontents and radicals in the lemmy sphere and many of them are very angry about the Reddit exodus invading their space. It will be a few months before these things settle out.
The instance I joined (Lemmy.world) currently has 460 financial contributors here: https://opencollective.com/mastodonworld & 303 on patreon: https://www.patreon.com/mastodonworld . Should be enough to cover the server costs. Moderation is a matter for communities to handle on their own, just like on reddit.
Subscription and donation model could really work. Loads of people subscribed to Apollo. Why not bring it over to lemmy? Or if Christian is not interested, someone else will be.
Reddit set such a high bar for API pricing that I think there’s plenty of room to support both front-end and back-end development as well as hosting for lemmy servers. We just need to work out a revenue-sharing model that gives everyone a piece of the pie.
The mod workload on fediverse is in addition to, and magnifies, the operational cost of running the servers. Put aside moderation then, I don't see how decentralized independent servers scale if "free", whereas centralized cos has VC and ad money to achieve this
The operational cost of growing marijuana, even indoors with pretty high-powered lights, is actually extremely low. You can make it expensive buying fancy nutrients and gimmicky hydro systems but when I was growing for the black market before legalization, me and every other grower I knew (we were legion) poured reasonably-priced nutrients into cheap pots under cheap lights and grew dank buds ferda.
Now (here in Canada anyways), a few giant corporations, in theory, do all the growing for the legit market, and need to handle a lot of large-scale problems, like big central grow ops requiring 1.21jigawatts instead of a bunch of houses using a bit of extra hydro each, security, pilferage, all the big problems of scale. These are problems of growing at scale, though, not problems inherent to growing weed.
We didn't have the problems of scale as a community of indepdendent growers. We had other problems: cops, filtering the smell so as to be good neighbours, larger ops had to deal with moisture, the reputation brought on by low-rent gangster scumbags who rent houses, setup and then threaten the landlord. We had the problems of an unregulated market, and the quality of our product as well as knowing a dealer determined our success, but basically anyone with basic competence and the ability to keep their mouths shut (ie. the barest of street smarts) could make an okay living back then.
I would say that Silo/Fedi is going to have a similar dynamic, minus the cops. Moderation happens by volunteers because people want to have a voice in determining what rules make the most sense for the communities they participate in, it's a non-issue in either world. Smaller instances will have smaller moderation loads, larger instances will either get supported by their users (money, work, whichever) or break up, or whatever, but it's going to settle into a congenial equilibrium in which the community of operators and users all look out for each other. We have seen the alternative, and we do not care for it, so we are going to put in the effort.
Communities with sufficient interest in existing with any control over their future and content may need to fund themselves via donation.
Also, in the 90s and early 00s, game servers cost money for many online FPS games - people hosted long running communities. Sometimes surviving via donation, sometimes just the benevolence of a person into the hobby with money. Community finds a way.
Do all lemmy servers host the same content or does selecting an appopriate server really matter a lot? (I was just signing up and had no idea what considerations one should make when selecting a server)
Unrelated: is there a way to do `random search term site:reddit.com` for lemmy?
Picking a Lemmy server mostly matters because different servers will have different moderation practices, UIs, and communities. So you should pick a server that gels with what you want from a community. Also keep in mind many servers have explicit federation block lists.
Once you've picked a server and signed up, you can access any community on any other server by just searching for the community url on your instance. If you subscribe, your instance will begin federating that community to your instance.
So far for me, I've noticed about half of my communities are instance local, and half are federated. The expectation I think is different communities in different instances will win and be the primary places for games, or technology, etc.
>The expectation I think is different communities in different instances will win and be the primary places for games, or technology, etc.
So there will be several r/games, r/videos, r/gifs, [...] on the Fediverse? This seems like a big hassle, no? Is there a built in solution to aggregate these?
One could argue that on Reddit subreddits also competed against each other, but in reality most of the time, the subreddit with the most approachable name always won. r/godot is obviously going to be the main Godot subreddit, even if there is a r/godot4coolkidz "competing" with it.
Yes and no, for example on Reddit there's a cars community and an auto community, they're moderated differently and so have different content even though they have the same subject. There are plenty of smaller communities for specific models of cars too; it's not like there's only the cars subreddit.
Having an instance attached is great imo, because it doesn't allow name squatting, anyone can make a cars community on their own instance now and grow it.
For the fediverse the large instances will probably have a lot of the generic popular communities, but it also allows groups to host their own instance for their niche. I think this is awesome, because those small niche communities are the best, and finding them is actually fun.
For example there's now a programming.dev instance that has the best programmer humor community, there's also a good rust community there. But there's also now a lemmyrs.org instance picking up steam and may take over. I'm subscribed to both, there isn't a limit.
As for finding community, there's a bunch of ways. Sidebars of your current favorite communities may link out to others; the communities tab of your instance, with All selected, will show any community any other user of your instance has subscribed to. But a good place to start looking for communities is https://browse.feddit.de
From my experience no. I picked Lemmy.ca and I'm subscribed to communities all over the place. You can go the Communities tab and just select "All" and start searching for communities regardless of where they are.
Honest question: for the user, how does the federation work if your "subreddits" (sublemmies?) are scattered between 10 different instances? On Mastodon it's quite a pain sometimes, if you open a link to someone else's instance, and then have to copy their link and paste on your instance to be able to follow
I think this is probably way harder/more annoying on lemmy, since if I have 1 user on abc.xyz, and I also browse and want to comment/upvote on qwerty.cxz and asdf.rocks
Having heard the Lemmy recommendation multiple times, I went ahead and tried the Lemmy.world instance but it appears completely broken. As far as I can tell, clicking "Login"[0] doesn't even trigger a network request?
I know it would be technically feasible, but would it be fully legal for Lemmy to scrape and re-populate posts from all of Reddit's niche community subreddits (and threads and conversations), 1:1, even maintaining the original user names associated with them... but not connecting them to actual accounts? Almost like static content. And they could use that as a basis for the new community, so that there is at least a baseline repo of content to peruse as real members start to join and post new topics/content?
I feel like that's a nice unorthodox way of making it not feel so viscerally "new and empty", which is usually what leads to a kind of inexplicable ick factor most people have when evaluating whether or not to join a community.
I've thought about similar techniques (mainly a static redirect for all reddit links to a read-only archive, as a browser plugin).
Technically speaking, this is mass copyright infringement, unless it happens to fall under fair use. Reddit wouldn't have standing (for content its admins didn't create), but every other user would. I can conceivably see a copyright suit being granted class action status, and Reddit (who does have a vested interest, even if they had no standing) bankrolling the whole thing.
The base Lemmy site does allow that. It looks like every button should lead to sign up dialogs but doesn't. Just select a serer, then join a server, hit communities at the top and select all in the green menu. I don't know if it shows you everything but it does give many pages of topics and what server they are on.
The interface is not up to old.reddit standards but better than the modern reddit interface. I like that because there many servers, any popular topic will have a bunch of subs to choose from. Seems a bit sparse with subscriber numbers per community but if that grows, I could see it scratching the reddit itch...
Thanks for this. I can see Lemmy as a definite alternative now. I joined a couple of Lemmy servers and I definitely like it so far, and I'm looking to move away from Reddit anyway.
The problem with the Fediverse as it currently stands is it goes against my long time use of forums. I'm usually only logged in on a desktop where I would post comments from. Most of my reading happens on pad, mobile or work where I have little desire to log in and in the case of a work computer I refuse to log in to anything personal. Kind of defeats the purpose of the whole thing...
Ya, I figured that out when I decided to give it a go and sign up. It takes two screens that look like one needs to sign up (just about everywhere else on the net would require it with a similar screen) but then it lets you pick a server without signing up. There is a big improvement they could implement: make it more obvious with less screens that you can browse without logging in...
Lemmy is a good idea with a terrible name and a misunderstanding of the experience users look for, much like mastodon. For example, I will never join any of these services but I will browse r/All, many lurkers drive traffic and reddit would be almost nothing without r/All which I can't figure out if lemmy has.
Exactly, someone with more time than me please create a nice looking, lurker friendly, read-only aggregator with all the different content in all the different servers/communities. Ideally merging submissions and comments when possible. You would have me immediately as a user and I bet I wouldn’t be the only one.
It’s so obvious that I guess someone must have done it and I just haven’t heard about it yet.
I've been drawn to kbin, it is part of the "Fediverse", so you can see kbin, lemmy, and I believe also mastodon posts from it. If you just anonymously browse to https://kbin.social/ (the main instance right now) you'll have something similar to the reddit front page, content from a bunch of different instances. It is definitely still a little rough around the edges, but considering it is one dev and the first commit was only two years ago, it seems pretty good.
Is it automatically pulling content from all other instances??? That was not clear to me, I though it was some form of cross-posting and required someone to submit things.
So... Sounds like you want what I keep thinking about:
Front end that works with feeds from multiple sources, like RSS, and permits comments, posts etc using SSO, with all interactions logged centrally in the SSO account (for later edits deletes etc).
Sound about right?
Because you me it seems like every provider in that list should be able to make a profit off the data and interactions... With users who want increased privacy able to pay for an SSO subscription to prevent the sale of data on that end.
And we already have all the parts to make it work...
I was thinking about this yesterday and in other threads people are writing about similar systems. The key thing for me and the word that keeps getting written is "RSS", I want a powerful client to experience different content in different ways. There are many communities and content creators that I want to follow but it's too complicated with modern platforms. From a usability standpoint it's bad both for creators and for end users, the result of this is that you miss out on some important stuff.
For example I might not have time to watch Twitch streams or Youtube videos from a creator over a couple months but I would still be able to go to a weekend event in my city or buy some some new merch that he announced. In general I would need to use another platform to not miss out (Twitter, Instagram).
If I controlled a client capable of aggregating all types of content I could decide to filter things out according to my immediate needs.
Content creators would own their own platform or choose a generic service provider and have freedom about what to make (video, image or text posts) and how to monetize.
The problems are who pays who, content discovery, and a decently sized userbase.
I only use RSS to convey the concept of a standardized syndication system, thus "like" being used rather than saying RSS itself....
But yes, what you say is exactly the point of what I'm talking about.
Some sites would focus on being the universal front end for casual browsing while others would focus on niche purposes such as moderation or unique content types/presentations.
The data would be stored with the user by default in my model, ensuring they have control of their content, and offloading a bunch of the delivery work from the front end site (essentially every users SSO becomes the cdn for their chunk of the content).
It has some problems but it's really not much different than now except it's easy as pie for people to get eyeballs on their content (does mean monetization has some issues, as it does now).
Yes although me being primarily a lurker I need even less. More than post or comment, if I have an account it would be to block some things and prfioritize other things more closely. What you describe would make sense for more extended functionality, but there is silent majority of lazy lurkers like myself that could be served very easily.
So my model would be one where you pick a site as your front end, most of which would have default curation and subscription to various subs, providing an experience like /all by default.
Though it would look like /all what it would really be is more like an RSS reader aggregating multiple sources according to your preferences.
A Reddit alternative would naturally form in this ecosystem, with smaller alternative front ends abounding, and take dominance just as Reddit did, but unlike Reddit it would not be able to screw over sub mods etc.
Subs would be truly independent of the front end site, even if they are themselves also front end providers.
It's Distributed Reddit in a sense.... Though in my view it'd be best to make it content agnostic, so it can be adapted to other uses, specifically for a YouTube clone and such.
Really, there's a model where for most it's essentially a Facebook alternative that integrates into thousands of third party forums seemlessly...
I would use that. Please go for it! It's so obvious to me. There's a giant discoverability gap in the whole fediverse thing that can be easily addressed. This is by design in mastodon, but I don't think these reddit alternatives are so against virality. The only risk is that the whole thing fizzles out so hard that even an aggregated view of the entire ecosystem doesn't produce enough content to keep people engaged.
If you do it, please keep in mind merging submissions and their comments, 6 separate entries for the same thing each with a couple of comments is a much worse experience than a single entry with a dozen comments. You can start by simply using the URL as a grouping key and try more sophisticated things later.
SSO only applies to those engaging, with those lurking being presented the default selection of subs for that front end site.
Essentially, Reddit Appollo and all the others are the front ends, with the subreddits being independent back ends (which would certainly also have their own front ends, even if restricted to their own sub).
Thus, the most popular front end would almost certainly just be a clone of old.reddit with the /all and /popular being made of the aggregate communities that front end has selected for default inclusion (with the most inclusive front end almost certainly "winning").
Tldr - SSO only matters for commenting/posting, lurkers would/could get literally the exact same experience as Reddit...
Yeah, but for the platform to succeed, there needs to be one /main aggregator site that I can point people to, I don't want to remember random servers.
At the top of the front page of any Lemmy instance (e.g., lemmy.world), you'll see a green and white button that reads, "[ Subscribed | Local | All ]. Just click All and you'll be looking at the feed equivalent of r/all. It will display the feed from all federated instances combined.
All of the ones I've tried just result in a spinning ball of death when trying to sign up too, I'm not sure if any of this actually works, or if registrations have been disabled so god forbid anyone can migrate from reddit. Do I seriously have to set up my own instance so I can make a fucking account or what?
I cannot for the life of me login to lemmy.world even after creating an account today. Is this due to increased traffic today or something else I don't understand about the platform?
I just joined. My understanding is that you pick your home server (I chose sh.itjust.works) and then you can add the local communities from there, as well as other communities on other servers. SJW (unfortunate acronym, IMO) had a list of local and remote communities that it already knew about that I could easily choose from, and my understanding is that there's a way to add more, but I didn't look into that because it had all the communities that I had considered joining directly anyhow.
It was pretty painless, though I haven't tried actually posting anything yet.
reddit and steve are too overconfident to see and realize that joining federation is their path to survival.
fear and denial will drive them to build garden walls when they should be transforming to stay ahead of obsolescence. turning into tiktok is fad chasing and a means to end of times, destruction, and relegation to has been status. myspace and tumblr realized too latomethi/ng
e, and their transformations were never positioned to restore former glory.
what i would like to see is federation separate itself into three components. identify, client, server. the identity system should be divorced from the other two components and allow me to sign into any server. (as much as typing this next sentence will lose some people, public blockchains are a good way to store identity, where different servers can collaborate to host a unified identity database.) anyone should be able to use any client with any server. adding servers to my client should be no harder than an rss subscription. my configuration, my subscriptions should be stored with my identity, (not in an instance) and instantly portable to new clients. having an identity protocol, many client vendors, and multiple standardized server implementations will create something long lasting and resilient. the firms who choose that path will be the leaders.
how could reddit monetize this? run an identity server, have a direct messaging path to customers. fracture and make many competing clients for different peoplebases and community types. some free, some not. build an open source server backend and go the redhat model, selling enterprise support to large firms that want to host a community, and sell development services to honor feature requests from those customers.
(i know the fediverse is close to a lot of this, but the way identity is tied to instance isnt something i see as ideal. a lack of nomadic identity / identity portability makes the fediverse as fragile as any other centralized site. the fediverse being grafted onto existing dns, and having identity owned by a specific downstream host is problematic. identity should be distributed above the dns layer, not below cnames. the same applies to communities not being able to push themselves to new instances in an .. instant. serving of data is too centralized, and a p2p cdn layer /ipfs would help. the instance and the client seem too closely tied together as well. the way i see the current instances is the opposite of portability. im sure there is a lot of fast moving development going on, and hope someone can correct me. top answer here is a bit of a dealbreaker https://www.reddit.com/r/Mastodon/comments/134oud8/are_there... and where a blockchain ecosystem could help.)
[reposted from the star trek thread, probably belongs in this one more]
It took ONE MONTH of AOL users to be unleashed upon Usenet to obliterate it as a discussion platform for all time. First, it was loaded up with stupid, low-content posters. Then the spammers came to throw dirt on the casket.
It seems to me like this is turning into a subreddit migration in slow motion. A lot people still want to post content and a lot of people still want to read content, so what's happening is people are posting it to the less popular 'alternative' versions of the popular subreddits and those posts make the frontpage instead. It seems like there is a noticeable decline in quality but i'm still seeing quite a bit of posting. Not sure if it's having the intended impact or not. I think the missing thing here is a viable, popular alternative. Digg died because reddit existed. If there was a consensus on the next reddit I would think reddit should be much more worried.
Also most people don’t really care about the API/3rd party app thing. It doesn’t impact them and it looks from the outside like a bunch of dorks with no lives getting worked up over nothing.
I’ve been on Reddit since the digg migration and I’ve never felt the need for an app, old.reddit.com and Adblock works perfectly fine on the phone. Better than Reddit’s mobile site.
It doesn't affect them directly, but the moderation tools a lot of subreddits need are built into third-party apps because Reddit refuses to build mod tools itself, and when those stop working then the job of moderating large and active subreddits will become vastly more cumbersome and frustrating, and far less efficient.
Maybe this issue only affects 0.1% of users, but those 0.1% of users do a lot for the site that depends on functionality that Reddit is unable or unwilling to provide.
It also seems as though a lot of moderators of larger subreddits are starting to see how little their users understand and appreciate the amount of work that goes into moderating a subreddit. When those mod tools are gone and their jobs get harder, they're going to get shat on even more than they already do by those users, because of the issue that those users said was just "a bunch of dorks with no lives getting worked up over nothing".
> It doesn't affect them directly, but the moderation tools a lot of subreddits need are built into third-party apps because Reddit refuses to build mod tools itself, and when those stop working then the job of moderating large and active subreddits will become vastly more cumbersome and frustrating, and far less efficient.
I checked yesterday and some widely used mod bots are already down. https://www.reddit.com/user/Blank-Cheque took all their bots down 10 days ago until the third-party apps change is reverted.
• AssistantBOT, AssistantBOT1 - This was broken by the Pushshift API cutoff. It's widely used for tracking sub usage statistics. The author is working on fixing it, but the last update was three weeks ago.
• Flair_Helper (Blank-Cheque) - This makes removing posts easier, especially on mobile. I haven't used it in anger.
• FloodgatesBot (Blank-Cheque) - This applies posting limits for users. There are a couple competitors, but I'm not sure how many are still running.
• Quality_Vote (Blank-Cheque) - This is used to allow users to remove unpopular posts. It can save a lot of moderation work in the right kind of sub.
• SafestBot (Blank-Cheque) - This is widely used by subs to ban spam and troll accounts. SaferBot, it's only alternative, was closed to additional subs some time ago.
What tools do they actually need? It seems to me like Reddit mods mostly automatically ban people for participating in subs they don't like. Last time they went on strike en-masse they were upset that Reddit didn't give mods more ability to track and spy on users in an Orwellian fashion
I made one comment on an anti-parent hate subreddit to try and explain why I thought they were wrong to automatically hate people for having kids, and then the subreddit for new parents automatically banned me. I tried to ask the mods on the subreddit for parents to unban me, and they muted me, and then Reddit gave me a temporary ban from the entire site for "harassment" of the mods
So far as I'm concerned, I'm happy to see the end of the little pocket dictator mods and the admins/Spez. It'll be a lot nicer if I can keep completely separate throwaway identities for talking about diapers and talking about philosphy
It's sad to see comments like these. It just reminds me that people will so readily take the work of others for granted.
The thing about the work mods do is that it's mostly invisible. If mods are doing their job, spam is getting deleted, reports are being serviced, and no one notices a thing. The subreddit seems to be working fine without them! It'd be easy to trick yourself into thinking they provide no utility. Even worse, since you don't notice the good work being done, all you do notice is the bad work (i.e. power tripping). Which, don't get me wrong, can be bad.
But tbh the complaints I've heard about "Orwellian" mods are completely overblown. I've used reddit for over 10 years and subscribed to hundreds of subs. I've had my posts removed by power tripping mods maybe a handful of times. The number of times I've seen a subreddit go to shit due to lax or nonexistent moderation is much much higher.
I want to be charitable here, but honestly, I looked over the list of mod tools someone posted in a sibling comment.. and most of them are just tools to attempt to blacklist people for wrongthink
I'm sure there are some small subs where the mods aren't huge jerks and benefit from usable tools to fight spam and deescalate flame wars, but I think we'll all be a hell of a lot better off with a bunch of unaffiliated or loosely-affiliated topical forums than we are with this current panopticon. The mods will be better off too: A guy moderating his own website will have better tools to combat spam and punish whatever he defines as trolls within his own kingdom.
This made me curious, and I'd never heard of this tool, so thanks for making me aware!
To further my point, I just looked myself up (same as my HN handle), and I only found 7 comments removed by mods. Most of which were honestly fair to remove, in my opinion.
Absolutely agree with you. My experience with Reddit moderators is that they are largely abusive, arrogant egomaniacs and I have absolutely zero sympathy for their hardship caused by lack of API access.
This is pretty much like people who say that we could just get rid of the police because all they do is harass everyone all day anyway.
Users in a well behaved system never notice the fantastic amount of work that goes into keeping the system well behaved. If you do your job right as few people as possible know you exist. It's the dilemma of the maintainer: extremely vital component of the system who everyone thinks does nothing in the best case and enraged at when something breaks in the worst case.
“…but the moderation tools a lot of subreddits need are built into third-party apps because Reddit refuses to build mod tools itself”
Why should the users care? Less moderation and more open speech would drastically improve most subreddits. This seems like it’s more and more just tantrum throwing from mods who almost feel embarrassed they’ve devoted thousands of hours of free work to a corporation that literally doesn’t care about them at all.
Moderators also ensure quality, by removing posts that don't follow rules.
For example, /r/ExperiencedDevs is one of my favorite subreddits. They have rules around the types of questions you can ask. These rules are put into place to prevent the subreddit from becoming like /r/CSCareerQuestions, or to prevent an influx of memes.
Without these tools or these moderators, I have a feeling some subreddits will become more generalist and possibly drop in quality.
I go to /r/ExperiencedDevs (and other subreddits moderated in a similar fashion) for a very specific set of posts and expectations for questions. I don't really want to see memes, jokes, etc. in the subreddit, as I have other ones to go for that.
Less moderation doesn't mean we turn into some Ayn Rand-ian bastion of free speech and justice and the american way. It means you see more onlyfans spam and ads for VPNs.
This comment contains one of the most-repeated pieces of misinformation from the whole blackout: moderation tools. Reddit has stated repeatedly that moderation tools will be exempted from the API changes.
"We will ensure existing utilities, especially moderation tools, have free access to our API."[1]
Many moderation tools relied on the Pushshift API; Reddit cut their access off last month. Pushshift will supposedly be restored (https://www.reddit.com/r/pushshift/comments/13w6j20/advancin...), but access must be approved by Reddit and is only open to mods with a Pushshift account; there are also additional usage restrictions. IMO it's an open question whether Pushshift or most services using it will ever be restored. Pushshift is now owned and managed by NCRI (Network Contagion Research Institute), which is based around selling the data to intelligence agencies (https://networkcontagion.us/technology/). Access for moderation tools isn't really part of their business model.
An additional factor is that the third-party app cutoff cost Reddit a lot of goodwill. Many mods reply heavily on third-party apps; they're much easier to use for moderation. Some subs such as r/traaaaaaannnnnnnnnns (393k users) have announced that they'll shut down because of this (https://www.reddit.com/r/traaaaaaannnnnnnnnns/comments/144tn...). Some popular bot developers such as u/Blank-Cheque have already taken their bots down. My other comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36343447) lists some of the affected bots.
But the app developers are not developing the apps as moderation tools, they are operating them as income projects by providing features users want. The mod users of their apps are a tiny subset, and they are underwritten by all the regular users.
There is a balance struck by any business when setting prices, and I would wager that every one of these app developers put a lot of thought into it based on Reddit's broken commitments. The mod userbase is not enough to support a single app, so this is just forked tongue doublespeak in the final analysis.
Unfortunately it seems that most of the reddit users/subs participating in this "strike" aren't interested in the facts. I see /r/science says it is private due to accessibility changes and it links to a Verge article, but the Verge article actually says that accessibility apps are exempted.
the whole point is Reddit says that accessibility apps are exempt except in those cases where the app that offers accessibility does, you know, other things that people want their apps to do.
Ok thanks for the explanation. From what I can see the issue is also whether the app is commercial or not, so it makes sense for reddit to restrict commercial apps that make money off their content. As people are saying, the best solution is for reddit to just make their own app/website more accessible.
Many of the facts aren't reported in the Verge article.
Last month Reddit cut off the Pushshift API (https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/134tjpe/reddit_dat...). It was widely used by moderation bots such as AssistantBOT. Pushshift will supposedly be restored (https://www.reddit.com/r/pushshift/comments/13w6j20/advancin...), but access must be approved by Reddit and is only open to mods with a Pushshift account; there are also additional usage restrictions. IMO it's an open question whether Pushshift or most of the services using it will ever be restored. Pushshift is now owned and managed by NCRI (Network Contagion Research Institute), which is based around selling the data to intelligence agencies (https://networkcontagion.us/technology/). Access for moderation tools isn't really part of their business model.
Accessibility apps are exempted only if they're free and noncommercial; they also can't access NSFW content. Many popular third-party apps that blind users rely on (https://www.reddit.com/r/Blind/comments/1447ibp/what_apps_me...) are commercial and will either be shutting down or have an uncertain future. It's unclear how many apps will make the transition; they weren't given anywhere near enough notice.
Reddit's CEO has publicly lied about discussions with Apollo's developer (https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/144f6xm/apollo_w...). Their credibility with developers is almost nonexistent. The Verge reporter may be taking their word for it, but few moderators and developers are.
The changes they've already made have led to many popular bots being shut down. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36343447) lists a few of them. u/SafestBot, one of the affected bots, is widely used to ban spam and troll accounts. It's a moderator at 342+ subreddits. If brigading is a serious problem in your sub, then your life has gotten a lot harder.
The official mobile app is hot garbage and uniquely poorly suited to moderation. Third-party apps save much of the work and are much easier to use. Some subs such as r/traaaaaaannnnnnnnnns (393k users) have announced that they'll shut down because of this (https://www.reddit.com/r/traaaaaaannnnnnnnnns/comments/144tn...).
I had a look at saferbot, but it doesn't seem like a good solution. In all the examples given the problematic subreddit was eventually banned by reddit. It just never makes sense to ban people for posting on a subreddit, because they could be disagreeing with it. The only time things like that are useful is if you ban all the people who like a post, but reddit doesn't give that capability.
It sounds like that trans sub just needs to farm out some of the moderator tasks rather than one person doing it all. If they have that many subscribers then they presumably have a lot of people who can help moderate.
> I had a look at saferbot, but it doesn't seem like a good solution. In all the examples given the problematic subreddit was eventually banned by reddit. It just never makes sense to ban people for posting on a subreddit, because they could be disagreeing with it. The only time things like that are useful is if you ban all the people who like a post, but reddit doesn't give that capability.
If your subreddit is being brigaded, then eventual bans don't help. It took years for r/The_Donald to be banned and over a year for r/NoNewNormal to be banned; meanwhile their users were trolling and brigading all over Reddit.
> It sounds like that trans sub just needs to farm out some of the moderator tasks rather than one person doing it all. If they have that many subscribers then they presumably have a lot of people who can help moderate.
They have 393k users, but how many are both interested and suitable for moderating? It's not easy to find good people, especially on a sub like that where mods are regularly harassed. Here's a concrete example (https://www.reddit.com/r/ModSupport/comments/14a5lz5/mod_cod...).
Right now, 100% of my usage is old.reddit.com and 0% of my usage is on the new design. These numbers won’t change if they remove old reddit — I’ll just stop using the site.
I keep hearing this repeated by people who use the site. Honestly, no they won't. At least the vast majority of them. There's literally no viable replacement.
For tech people, you're looking at the viable replacement. For other people, if they're deliberately going out of their way to avoid the redesign after all these years, they may replace it with nothing (and be happier, as most people find they are when they quit social media).
I wouldn't call the user experience "perfectly fine" though. It's about as "perfectly fine" for exploring the content on a phone as pasta with ketchup is perfectly fine for eating. You won't starve but you also aren't really having a good time.
HN is fine on desktop but I don't really enjoy it on mobile much. Tiny tap targets, font sizes and spacing seem a bit "off", etc, and so I use a third party client.
Have similar feelings about old reddit on mobile.
What it comes down to is that yeah they're better than new reddit, but that's not much of a bar to clear and if I'm going to be spending extended periods of time using a site/service the experience needs to be good not just passable.
There are some good HN mobile clients. On iOS I use (and purchased) Octal [0]. I find this particular mobile experience far superior to the HN website.
> Also most people don’t really care about the API/3rd party app thing. It doesn’t impact them and it looks from the outside like a bunch of dorks with no lives getting worked up over nothing.
This may be a case where certain people are more important than most people.
> looks from the outside like a bunch of dorks
It appears the "dorks" are the certain people who have been making Reddit work for most people.
Are they? Despite everyone saying this, Reddit seems to be humming along. I log onto the front page and have something of the "normal" reddit experience. For instance, "heh. Look at that fish, that's crazy". I mindlessly scroll past all the "REDDIT IS BEING BAD" posts the same way I scroll past Youtube drama posts, or "How Elon is ruining Twitter" drama posts. I'm here to look at funny pictures.
Maybe I'm in a reverse sub-bubble, but outside of the tech circles complaining, the protest still seems to be "what protest?"
> Maybe I'm in a reverse sub-bubble, but outside of the tech circles complaining, the protest still seems to be "what protest?"
My wife noticed day-1 of the protests (I know because she asked me for the TL;DR of WTF is happening) and she doesn't move in tech circles, and the subs she likes (liked?) are all pop-culture stuff. Pretty sure she's just not been using reddit since then, as all of what she cared about is gone. Other non-tech friends of mine also noticed within 24 hours of the protests starting, with similar "well, damn, guess I'll find somewhere else to waste time" reactions.
But, all of the people I know who use reddit use it only for a few subs, and hardly ever visit the site's front page except by accident. I don't know anyone who's like "I'll just go to the Reddit homepage and look for something interesting that it's decided to promote", though I'm sure such users exist (and may even be the majority, for all I know).
You realize this is anecdotal and not statistical evidence of the larger population of Reddit users, right? What percentage are like your friends, versus how many continue to use Reddit, or will go right back when things return to normal, one way or another?
Seems self-explanatory. They're fighting for profitability, prioritizing mass-appeal, prioritizing ads, and maintaining two UIs in an advertising business sounds like a huge hassle. I'm too lazy to edit the URL so I don't even know - does old.reddit.com even support the giant image ads?
Also, old reddit has to remain mostly unchanged for it to fulfill its purpose, which means marketing can't incessantly twiddle things with A/B tests and push crap like NFT avatars.
This whole Adblock thing is gonna come to a head with the modern “economic headwinds” I think. Like, how did people think it was gonna work out…? YouTube and Reddit would just keep going forever with some sizable percentage of their user base earning them 0 money?
we either need to start paying for stuff instead of the bullshit invasive Display Ads model (half measure), accept the death of Adblock (I imagine I’ll get HN hate mail for even suggesting such a thing), or nationalize/otherwise remove the profit motive from these companies. I don’t see “the two main online forums for public discourse randomly decided to a) lurch towards far-right Russian propaganda and b) change everything in their push to get their VC investors some ridiculous return on investment, respectively” as an acceptable thing. Sadly my preferences aren’t exactly big news, and I assume the reaction from society at large will continue to be “oh no! Anyway…”
You could have written this comment about tape decks, CD ripping or Napster. In the end, what's technically possible always wins. As long as adblockers are technically feasible they will continue.
Napster didn't win though? It got crushed by giant media conglomerates. They were able to stifle easy piracy. With legal warfare, and actual decent products, they pretty effectively funneled people into legally consuming digital content, limiting piracy, and replaced physical ownership (CDs) with ephemeral subscriptions.
Napster the company didn't win, but file sharing and distributed sharing is the reason Spotify doesn't cost $1,000/month and we are no longer buying tracks for $1 on the iTunes store.
Because what most people wanted was listening to music, not owning music. And a lot of them are ok paying a fee periodically to do so. It could have been the same for movies, but siloes and prices are making this frustrating.
If they shut out third party apps from official APIs, that isn't game over. Those apps can still scrape HTML and while the new reddit frontend is modern and can easily combat this, old.reddit is an unmaintained static target.
They presumably know this or if they don't, they soon will. To avoid allowing app devs to run around the API changes they have to either continue maintaining the front end or cut the dead weight. Given their decision making lately, I'm going for the latter.
Either I switch to the new interface and be grumpy about it for a few weeks until I get used to it, or I stop going on Reddit and spend less time mindlessly consuming content? Or maybe I spend more time on TikTok/Instagram short form video? I’m not really worried about the bad spez taking away my reddits.
This is a fundamental issue with your analysis. Reddit mods are integral to the site’s operations, and they aren’t employees they can just order around.
Reddit official app and new website both suck, majority of my friends use reddit, but none of them use official clients - all third party apps or old.reddit.
I also love old.reddit.com with RES, but I have no illusion that Reddit likes it too.
It seems likely to me that the same factors that motivate Reddit to do away with high-quality, user-oriented third party frontends will also motivate it to do away with old.reddit.com and RSS.
I mean I like Apollo but I’m not going to waste my time getting involved in aimless slacktivism if the overlords of Reddit have decided they no longer want to do something that makes no business sense. I’ll just move on to their official app, I guess.
Agreed. I'd argue most don't even know what an API is. Eventually super moderators will end this standoff and reddit subreddits will be restored, the masses wont even care like they don't now.
i used to think old reddit was great and all i needed on the ipad until someone convinced me to try apollo... it’s simply 1000x better in all regard. stupidly fast and clean.
Yeah, the biggest issue for me as a Reddit user is despotic mods. And frankly, this shut down is another good example of how problematic they are. There was important information these past few days I couldn't get to because mods locked it away behind this blackout. A handful of mods had polls, but for most subs the mods just decided they were going to lock away all the user created content, and did so without the community having a say. Which is ironic, because that's the same thing they're complaining about Reddit corporate doing.
I think even though there is no consensus on the next Reddit, this might be another inflection point in Reddit downhill. It might not die on short term but I think being super crappy to your userbase makes you more vulnerable to future competition. I'm thinking something like what Tiktok did to Instagram or Facebook.
I am really hoping the next Reddit is not some megacorp effort.
> If there was a consensus on the next reddit I would think reddit should be much more worried.
I think Reddit should be very worried. Federation works fine for a "forum-like" replacement that doesn't need to be super timely.
Yes, the federated replacement is currently half-baked. You're not going to pick up the unwashed masses this round.
However, more than a few technical sub-Reddits that have simply shut down and are not coming back. The technical users didn't care much for Reddit to begin with and don't mind putting in some elbow grease to permanently kick Reddit to the curb. Lots of technical people now suddenly know about Lemmy who didn't have any clue before.
I have no doubt that Reddit will win this round, but it's a Pyrrhic victory. A nice chunk of software development talent is now mobilized to build the thing to wipe them out.
To be fair, I don't think the CEO is actually wrong. The AI companies are absolutely free-riding on everybody and that needs to stop. However, the way it was done with the API was not kosher--I suspect had he just grandfathered everybody using the API prior to date <X>, everything would have been fine.
Yup. I unsubscribe from the blacked out subs (they free to go dark, but I'm equally free to leave when they do), and sign up to the new or less popular ones that are still working.
I have no skin in the game, and couldn't care less either way what happens to Reddit company, the subs, their third party apps, or the moderators.
To echo what another commenter said, I feel like a lot of the suggested alternatives are missing the mark a bit in regards to understanding what Reddit actually is (a community of communities). It seems like a lot of the platforms that are popping up are more akin to being just a huge bucket full of posts with hashtags opposed to being a collection of communities. They are sort of missing out on capturing the community part.
Shameless plug, but that's been a focus of ours with the platform that I've been building (sociables.com). We are trying to create an all in one stop for people to create communities, and not just posts.
Why not just do that? Sure, it's a lot of python, and probably full of security holes, but there are enough reddit users to fix that, and the risk that your reddit instance might be taken over by malicious people is lower than the risk that centralized reddit will (since it already has been...)
Anyway, each time I link to it, I get crickets in response. Not sure why.
I would think people are hesitant to go down the exact same road as before. How will this address long-term scaling costs and concerns of the new-reddit repeating current-reddit's path?
The motion is very slow though. How do I even find alternative subreddits? Most subreddits do not allow cross-advertising anyway and reddit's search tool is total garbage.
I don't think reddit needs to be replaced, but they need to change some things. All subreddits are replaceable, and so are mods so i don't see the point of this protest
Interesting enough Tumblr has had a big surge in users the last few days, they’re pretty convinced it’s mostly redditors. I don’t know how big of a surge it is, and of course Tumblr is not Reddit to say the least, but people are definitely poking around. It’s interesting!
Since you've got insight into operating, can you clarify for me: Does federation happen at the community level?
So for instance, using reddit terminology, if I subscribe to r/gardening on your instance, do I get the same thing as everyone else gets in r/gardening on all the instances you federate with?
I'm clear on federation in general but not how it works for link aggregation. I've been reddit-free for about a year now but I've been planning to check out Lemmy once the current wave dies down and I'm not contributing to load stress.
I have added some other instances to my list of allowed instances and these are now showing up as linked instances in https://zapad.nstr.no/instances
I have seen other people leave comments on posts across instances but I have not yet figured out how I can use my user on my instance to leave a comment on another instance
> One way you can take advantage of federation is by opening a different instance, like ds9.lemmy.ml, and browsing it. If you see an interesting community, post or user that you want to interact with, just copy its URL and paste it into the search of your own instance. Your instance will connect to the other one (assuming the allowlist/blocklist allows it), and directly display the remote content to you, so that you can follow a community or comment on a post. Here are some examples of working searches
> If you search for a community first time, 20 posts are fetched initially. Only if a least one user on your instance subscribes to the remote community, will the community send updates to your instance. Updates include:
> New posts, comments
> Votes
> Post, comment edits and deletions
> Mod actions
> You can copy the URL of the community from the address bar in your browser and insert it in your search field. Wait a few seconds, the post will appear below. At the moment there is no loading indicator for the search, so wait a few seconds if it shows "no results".
Interesting... I might still be getting the concept clear in my own head but that can definitely work. It does seem to me that it will shake out with larger communities still under the control of a specific instance, like, I'm sure there will end up being one big canonical Rust community, cause nobody wants to check multiple forums about the same topic.
There have definitely been cases where I did attend multiple forums of the same format and same topic, but generally because I was in transition from one to the other, such as when alt.music.ween was dying and I started trying out the popular Web Forum of the time. In the end I gave up the community of Internet Ween fans, because coming from Usenet, which was absolutely beautiful if viewed using a good client program, web forums were like trying to write a business letter in crayon.
For me, it was actually the first round of enshittification, and we did it without any VC help at all; fact of the matter is that the web forums were easier to use, and so more people came to them, and up to a point, that does result in better community, particularly with non-technical subjects like obscure bands with cult followings.
But, it really did boggle my mind that anyone could use those things without going completely insane at the terrible bad and no good interfaces with no filtering or thread view etc etc (especially early on), but it was an important lesson in psychology for me: they did not have the context of the only-a-tiny-bit-harder, but galaxies-better thing that already existed, they only saw "here is a thing I can use to talk to people about a thing I like, which never existed in my world before," and from there they can tolerate any shortcoming, because it's all novelty. People thought Pong was mindblowing.
Eventually, as the ever-growing blob of spam goo make the Usenet landscape radioactive and impassable, and there was clearly a huge party going on in the forums, everyone just left, other than the diehards that always stay out of some misplaced stubborn urge. A lot of those forums hadn't even figured out how to pay for themselves, and in many cases never did, they just did it so that something would be there where before there was nothing.
All in all, things are really starting to look like the old internet, and it warms the cockles of my heart, truly it do.
I wonder if that will affect the management of the subs. Some mods had what we may call agendas but mods in alternate subs may have different agendas (obviously since one is protesting and the other not), but this could also affect the course of subs and could differ from what people were used to (hammer the nail that sticks out vs oil the squeaky wheel approaches)
It's been very interesting, and part of that is my fault - been posting a lot here instead of reddit (when I should probably just post nowhere). The vote counts seem crazy high this week, even for typical stories.
I will say that I haven't noticed a decline in quality of posts; not sure if that's due to a strong culture or strict moderation. I suppose most of the Reddit refugees only browse the HN homepage, so HN veterans still have an out sized impact on the New page, which in turn dictates what can reach the top.
I feel like this is somewhat of an indictment of Mastodon. Maybe its not a 1:1 replacements but I feel like they could be capitalizing on this moment and it feels like they're not in the conversation.
Sorry, but digg died because they told their community in unmistakable terms (aka v4) that they don't matter. Reddit happened to be there to take the refugees.
Yes, I've seen more than one subreddit who barely had enough users to keep going do the indefinite shutdown thing and it's just going to kill the community.
Mastodon believes this and willfully denies search functionality. Tech built to search Mastodon (https://fedsearch.io/) was aggressively decried as violating privacy and such.
So yes, there is certainly at least a vocal subset of people who believe that "finding information is bad actually" and deliberately building tech along those lines.
It's insane because Discord has the usage stats to see that the first thing a majority of users do when joining a new server is to force mute group @ notifications.
I honestly wonder why this is even a feature they support, but it should absolutely be defaulted to mute and/or have a checkbox for it in the new server join banner. They force collect phone numbers while highlighting the fact that they will spam the ever-loving fuck out of your notifications.
I agree with all of that, but honestly the more important factor is this is just not a very good cause to get all worked up about. Reddit is trying to grow into a profitable company, their business model is showing ads to users, they obviously can't just let millions of people use 3rd party apps for free.
I think even casual users understand this perfectly well. They don't use 3rd party apps for browsing Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or Tiktok (because those services also don't offer APIs). Why should Reddit be different?
Reddit is different because it has been different. Not everything needs to conform prior social media models.
I think the cause is totally fine. I think framing it as some social justice cause is incorrect though. People really liked a thing and now reddit is taking it away in the name of money. The most downvoted post of all time on reddit is an EA post responding to monetization concerns in a star wars game. Seems right in line to me.
It's because the Reddit users that are actually bothered by this are unmonetizable and everyone knows it. nobody is eager to jump into that sink hole and Reddit itself is happy to be free of it.
A Reddit alternative is something every developer on here thinks they can crank out in a weekend and surely countless of them are actually trying that right now. But the reality is that reddit is a mess and nobody in their right mind wants to try to run a site like that.
They would be perfectly monetizable if they wanted to. I'd happily pay for a Reddit premium subscription if I can keep using Apollo, because I use it for the better UX, not to skip ads. But clearly they would rather kill third party apps than take their money.
> I'd happily pay for a Reddit premium subscription if I can keep using Apollo
This is what I don't get. Isn't this the obvious compromise to make all parties happy? Third Party apps can only be used by Premium members. Moderation tools are explicitly exempted until their functionality is rolled into first-party tools. Reddit adds new tools to block scrapers and institutes API rate limits for things they recognize as LLMs/negative bots and instead offer an "enterprise" tier for those that is much more expensive. Something along those lines would likely meet the needs of everyone and wouldn't piss anyone off. Reddit users continue our doom scrolling on Relay and Apollo, Reddit monetizes previously-unmonetizable users.
> It's because the Reddit users that are actually bothered by this are unmonetizable and everyone knows it.
Yes, this is exactly the same as the Netflix account sharing controversy. People who aren’t generating the company any profit are shouting the loudest. I don’t think there’s much of a loss here.
The era of free money was always going to end and now it’s over.
The loss is that those people might not be generating content, but they do have eyeballs and those eyeballs aren't looking at the content generated by the monetizable people. That means they're also not looking at the ads Reddit wants to serve to users in exchange for payment from advertisers.
You're right about the era of free (well… really, really cheap) money being over. I think we're going to see that social media as we know it (which has _only_ existed in the era of cheap money) isn't nearly as sustainable without a bunch of VCs willing to shovel money into a furnace in hope for unknown future returns. There's going to be a contraction.
I keep seeing people make this claim and frankly I don't buy it. While I think it's true that a minority of users produce a majority of the content, I don't think it's necessarily the people on third party apps. I think it's total speculation that there's a large overlap.
My own speculation is that a majority of the content is produced by people using Reddit in a browser on a laptop/desktop machine. It's much faster and easier to produce content in this mode.
That's a claim, but only time will tell to what degree it is accurate. Some people certainly want to continue continue creating content and we will see the degree to which they figure out alternative subreddits if the blackout continues
It’s not clear there’s anything “unique” about the set of users that both generate the content and will leave the site because of the API changes. From an investor standpoint, content is content and monetizeable users are monetizable users. Both are replaceable, and it’s better to have monetizable users that generate content than non-monentizeable users who generate content.
I go to Reddit to look for information on specific things. People talking about Med interactions, app support, very specific things. I don't interact with Reddit because it's a cesspool, and very politically slanted. I'll probably go wherever real people talk about real stuff, and it's almost always reddit. I wonder what percentage are like me, who have no value in "community"?
Most mods (who oversee the generation of new content) use the API because third-party apps offer superior mod tools. Instead of thinking about "shutting down third party apps" think about it as "asking your volunteer labor to do the job on hard mode". You can see why those people might get pissed off.
I understand why they’re pissed off, it’s just not clear to me that they are irreplaceable. Lots of people here are talking about their favorite niche subreddit but is that really where the value is derived, advertising wise? I doubt it. I’m fairly certain that the top 25 or so subreddits drive most of the revenue, and they have no dearth of people willing to mod them. Hell, if Reddit Inc just in-housed moderation of the the top 100 subs they’d probably be fine.
Who else is making Netflix money? Their catalog is currently so small and bad that it makes no sense to keep an account per person. Proliferation of streaming services doesn't help - individually, none of them is worth paying full price per person or household.
Netflix grew 4.9% YoY in Q1. They have introduced an ad-supporter tier, so it’s now advertisers that foot some of the bill for content in addition to subscribers and investors.
To your point about paying full price —- it would be interesting to have a breakdown of the number of “evergreen subscribers” vs “fair weather subscribers,” but I’m not sure Netflix would be willing to share such a breakdown. This would tell us whether a majority of its subscribers think of the basic value of the service.
I block ads, nuke cookies, and use old.reddit.com exclusively, but somehow I still manage to spend a lot of money on shit I don't need. Most of it was found on reddit. All of it got a google search that included "site:reddit.com" before buying. This anecdote is not unique. The fact that reddit gets $0 despite being part of my typical buyers journey is a failure of Steve Huffman, not the users.
If Reddit automatically added product links to comments like Viglink did in the bad old days, you wouldn't be using it. Reddit's failure to capture affiliate revenue is precisely what prevented it from being gamed, thus making it a credible source of information.
I have literally paid for the Reddit app that I use. And I would not mind paying a recurring fee if it was reasonable. Users for third party apps are most likely to be the most addicted users of reddit. If investors can't tell that, they deserve to watch their investment fail.
I've paid for Apollo and I would pay at least a few dollars per month for my personal API access to keep Apollo working. Those of us who don't want to use the official app aren't unmonetizable, we just have good taste.
Actually I bought Reddit coins at some point (to give Awards) and I'm bothered by this. Hopefully Lemmy will be an alternative or maybe Reddit folks will change their mind. Obviously I'm okay with paying for services in principle but I think it requires that it's voluntary and affordable.
That said, the Reddit Web Frontend is not exactly the best. I've used - and paid - for a native Reddit client actually (Stellar). The app will be sunsetted though.
I've had a Reddit subscription for mulitple years, and spent more than I care to admit buying coins to guild/gift posts and comments. I also paid for Apollo.
I deleted my account this week, being a monetizable person who is quite bothered.
> It's because the Reddit users that are actually bothered by this are unmonetizable and everyone knows it.
The Reddit users that are bothered by this also include mods that use third-party tools for moderation activities. If those users leave, or are no longer about to function, that has potential long-term consequences for Reddit.
Yeah, it's an interesting experiment and democracy and or authoritarianism. Subreddit mods have made the decision to take the subs private. There seems to be some popular support but it isn't Universal. Those that don't care about the issue can recreate those subs and continue posting.
It will be interesting to see how things play out over time.
Edit: is interesting to note the knee jerk negative reaction to this comment. I don't think it contains anything controversial and is a simple statement of reality
IMHO, Reddit's charging such a high price for API access that it's as good as unattainable is more of a last straw then anything else. Reddit has been clear that they view the data as their sole property, when you think it through, why be a moderator for a for-profit company if you aren't being paid?
I don't know why it took this long for moderators to quit.
During my time modding, I viewed the subreddit I ran as being very thoroughly in the second group. All the users shared an interest in a particular game. Myself and all the other mods were people that enjoyed the game first and foremost. We did not accept any moderator applications from users that were the prototypical Reddit mods and no one ever went on to join other mod teams.
And I will say, it was honestly extremely fun. I got to build moderator tooling through the API that was interesting and had immediate real world use. Reddit moderation was the catalyst for becoming a developer myself and directly lead to my current career.
I met a diverse group of people from across the globe and formed many lasting friendships with people I would have never met otherwise. Beyond that, it also gave me opportunities to learn more about video game production, go on studio tours, meet game developers, and have experiences that few others ever will.
The mods on the team were not naive. We understood we were providing an extremely valuable service to both Reddit and the game developer for free— but for us, it was a mostly straight forward hobby that presented interesting logistical challenges. For years now, the status quo has been that Reddit may be making some obnoxious UX choices, but none of them had any actual affect on the moderator experience. Most mods were insulated from the changes because we used third party apps and old.Reddit.
I think it is deeply unfortunate that Reddit moderation does attract some of the worst internet users and many people have very negative experiences and opinions when it comes to mods —but for some corners of the site, Reddit moderation was a genuinely enjoyable hobby shared with like minded friends.
I was a mod for a while with /r/AskEngineers. It was never really that big of a subreddit, slowing crossing over 50K subscribers during my time there. And while small, we got to deal with all the usual issues any subreddit sees. In our case, it was conspiracy theorists "just asking questions" about the WTC tower collapse, school students asking people to do their school assignments for them, and stuff like that.
In my time moderating /r/aiclass, I also got the experience of interacting with someone with a genuine mental illness. :-/
I didn't become a mod to win Internet points or for some kind of social status. I was just there to facilitate good conversation between engineers, so that we can help each other. I didn't mind the labor involved, and I just wanted to promote engineering as a discipline.
There was just one active mod when I joined, and he started building up a good (if small) team. That continued through the years as people came and left, and we had a good crew when I resigned. I won't do it again anytime soon (maybe after I retire, who knows), but it was definitely worthwhile, and I hope I was able to make a difference for people.
I don't think many moderators will actually quit as long as the users are there, especially since reddit gave back some moderator API call access. Moderating is already a terrible, thankless job. The people who do it enjoy moderating because (I assume) they're 'in charge' of something big and important. I don't think reddit closing off third party access will be enough to convince most of these people to stop giving labor for free.
This is the thing I don't get, reddit is getting a heck of a free ride with all these mods. You'd think they would do everything within their power to enable them so why kick them in the nuts?
Also the "power" users would probably be happy to pay reasonable prices to interact with it via app/api, so go ahead and charge something REASONABLE.
There's something nefarious going on behind the scenes and it's all very suspicious. I'm happy to go back to targeted forums if I need to.
Indeed. I'd happily pay Reddit directly for an API key if that let me run RIF in a "bring your own key" mode. They could split the profits between themselves and app dev. I'm surprised no one is proposing this. But I guess this comes down to people willing and able to pay to avoid adtech cancer being actually the most profitable cohort for the advertisers...
this is explicitly blocked by TOS. You can notionally do it by taking a "RedditIsFun" APK and injecting your own API key and then sideloading, but they'll do app store takedowns for any third-party app that supports it natively (because it's a TOS violation).
I don't even think it's behind the scenes. It seems plain as day that they're trying to recoup the cost of their shitty website redesign and even shittier app. Since everybody is using third-party apps (which use the API), they pulled the most tonedeaf, corporatist approach and targeted those third-party apps. Instead, they should have dome some soul-searching to realize that they burned a money pile to make garbage because they decided their primary users were advertisers.
Where you assume malice, I would assume a combination of garden variety greed and short sightedness. Sometimes people do dumb things, it's pretty common really, even for 'people in charge of big things'.
> You'd think they would do everything within their power to enable them so why kick them in the nuts?
They're probably tracking revenue and engagement metrics. This happens in a lot of places. Everyone knows there's important infrastructure that keeps things working, but new user-facing projects are always more exciting. Even with physical infrastructure, it's more exciting to build new roads than fix potholes.
What you're saying here sounds to me like "I think the current moderators are bad, get rid of them all and get new ones who will be much better"
I have some ...doubts about how well something like this would work in practice. Burning large systems down and starting over is generally not more efficient than tweaking the system you have.
They’re not. The political leaders at the top are, but the civil servants who actually keep the lights on and everything running stick around from administration to administration.
We’ve learnt a lot about the necessity for institutional knowledge and continuation over the years.
Reddit with a whole new set of mods will be a worse experience overall. The largest and most general subs will probably be alright but good luck finding mods for the more focused and specialist subs.
That's such an uncharitable view of Reddit moderation. Look at examples like /r/cfb and /r/collegebasketball for good hard-to-replace moderation. Game threads (and post-game discussions) are consistently formatted and on-topic. And the mods are able to invite coaches for AMAs with no drama.
The people complaining about moderators are the very same people who don’t read the rules and complain that the moderators are on a power trip.
I moderate a small sub 15K and the amount of spam is insane. I can’t imagine the amount of work involved in a 1M sub.
I'm a lead mod of a 1.5M+ sub and we maybe remove 1-2 bits of spam per week. Usually the very few that do get through our filters are quickly reported by the users and are removed long before it gains traction
I realize giving reddit mod advice on HN is a bit weird, but here is what we've done that has significantly helped
1. Operate off a white list for links instead of a blacklist -- allow posts from domains like twitter, github or whatever is a normal for your community. Set up auto mod to filter any domains outside of the whitelist so mods can review and approve the appropriate ones
2. No URL shorteners at all. There are very good anti-url-shortener scripts for automod. Adding this cut out 90% of the spam we got
Those are two suggestions that i would give to any subreddit. Here are some that you should carefully weigh before you implement
1. Set up automod to filter a post / comment if it gets to a certain threshold of reports.
2. Enforce a minimum karma amount & age to post w/ automod
3. Enforce a minimum karma amount to comment with a link w/ automod
To give you a starting point -- even our large subreddit, our requirement to post is an account older than 6 hours and >0 Karma. For comments with a link, we do >25 karma
> why be a moderator for a for-profit company if you aren't being paid?
They like the power of being a moderator and smacking down people who break the rules. Usually they also like to bend the rules themselves to push a personal agenda, promoting what they like and squashing what they don’t like.
It’s the same motivation people have to serve on HOA boards or elected government positions.
I'd love to see some hard data on your claims because this seems cynical to the point of being inaccurate
As the creator and moderator of a 100k sub these are the last things on my mind - and same for the other moderators. The whole point of creating and moderating that was because 13 years ago I thought it was the best place to build a community that I wanted to exist.
I have no idea if that's true for the moderators for /pics or whatever massive sub-reddits are, but I do know that for a lot, and especially the long tail subs and the folks I see in the /modcoord sub and discord, moderators are people who are interested in maintaining a community because they are interested in the affinity.
How does one quantify that? Reddit moderators have a reputation that they themselves created. I'll tell you what, go ahead an post something (comment or topic) that goes against the prevailing group-think in any reddit sub, and you'll experience it for yourself. Record in a spreadsheet, and you'll have your hard data that supports reddit as cancer. As reddit moved away from free speech, and more towards totalitarian speech control, I honestly couldn't hope for a faster collapse or conflagration of those echo chambers.
I’m sorry but the scale that Reddit is at now and the number of subs that have large and thriving communities tells me that moderators aren’t creating some hellscape preventing community from forming.
I mean that's a possible motivation for some folks, but not everyone.
I know that when I've taken on unpaid positions of responsibility (not as a reddit mod but within my hobbyist community), it's because I cared about the organization and the people in it, and getting things right.
There are definitely power-trippers who are attracted to these roles. But there are also people who just want to facilitate a nice community and enjoy their little corner of the internet while making it enjoyable for others.
I think people who accuse mods of "just being on a power-trip" are the same people who get mad when their HOA tells them they have to trim the hedges so their neighbor can back out of their driveway safely.
It's myopic and doesn't give mods credit for seeing the bigger picture. This website, for example, is heavily moderated to keep protecting the feeling of "Reddit in the early days." If the mods here weren't on top of that, this place would be overrun by the type of stuff that is now on Reddit's front page.
100% this. A moderator of any large subreddit has almost guaranteed been offered money to “sell it”. And if there’s any product associated to the subreddit, they get a ton of offers to promote said products. I know there are mods out there that easily make full time incomes from side hustles only possible bc they’re mods
Yeah I’d agree with that too. People who care about something often like to be in a position where they can impact the thing they care about. “Power” isn’t a totally cynical way of describing it.
Yeah I'm pretty sure all these cynical comments are people who think Reddit is just huge spaces like /r/technology or /r/gaming_circlejerk.
There are literally thousands of small subreddits run by people who actually care about their communities. I feel most of the hate here for all moderators is coming from people who believe there should be no moderation at all.
As I mentioned in another reply, “power” doesn’t necessarily mean someone is a sociopath, it just means they like that they can have an impact due to the control they have. In my experience with Reddit mods, usually that comes from a good place.
I only take exception with the idea that mods are doing their jobs thanklessly.
Not all value is monetary. Some moderate because they like having a functioning community to take part in. They don't mind that the company is for-profit because everyone is winning.
With these changes not everyone is winning anymore.
I'm a Relay user on Android, and the creator of Relay has said he may need to charge $3/mo for the app (previously was a buy-once for $2). It's useful enough for me to pay that much, and Reddit has every incentive and right to charge for API access. I think they did the community a disservice with the tight timeline and how they communicated the change, but I can survive $3/mo to pay for a service that I have enjoyed for well over a decade now.
I feel for moderators who have had to deal with crappy tools for so long and have had to rely on the API to get things done. I do question what Reddit has done with the VC money and the dev time they have put in. Their app is undeniably worse than the 3rd party alternatives, and the lack of decent mod tools that required the use of bots is something they should have sorted out YEARS ago. The lack of accessibility from their own app is also very questionable, and their response was to only allow not-for-profit accessibility tools to continue using the API for free. They should have addressed their shortcomings instead of features that have questionable utility, like real-time chat.
The biggest Reddit communities are in open rebellion. Twitter is, charitably, a mess. Twitch started taking a full 50% of the revenue of their top creators, who are furious.
What's going on? What's the bigger trend that's causing all these platforms to go so user-hostile?
People are starting to come to terms with the new reality where tech companies actually need to have a viable business model which takes in more money than it expends. The return of nonzero interest rates means that the runway is no longer infinite, you can't just raise more money to cover costs forever, eventually you have to either take off or crash. This is revealing just how much of a nonsensical anomaly most of the 2010s were for many internet companies. COVID provided a brief return to this period but it couldn't last. The idea that large companies can be run at an operating loss indefinitely is going to be dying a slow painful death over the next few years along with any companies which can't make the transition to actually earning money, and that is the way it should be.
I don’t know, it’s looking like most people prefer businesses that eschew profits.
Yea my business-101 textbook says businesses should run a profit, but my sociology-101 textbook says we should do things that are good for people.
Maybe Reddit (et al) should be recreated as non profits dedicated to community building… before Facebook becomes the sole source of internet social interaction.
How will non-profit Reddit pay its costs? What makes you think doing things for the good of people is excluded by for profit businesses? They create all sorts of products and services that people want and need. Yes, there are abuses. Same with non profits. Because humans are in charge.
The problem with doing things for the good of people in a general sense is that you still need to have a functioning economy where scare resources are allocated somehow.
> What makes you think doing things for the good of people is excluded by for profit businesses?
This entire thread is proof. The entire thread is platforms that people liked started to suck as soon as they decided to make a profit.
Sure theoretically profitable businesses can be good for people, but I’m not holding my breath for an example.
> The problem with doing things for the good of people in a general sense is that you still need to have a functioning economy where scare resources are allocated somehow.
Scarce resources is a cute textbook term but very few things in society, especially on the internet, are scarce. Profits must come from somewhere, and that somewhere is your customers. So it’s almost tautological that profits are bad for customers.
Reddit was built on free content from unpaid users being moderated by unpaid mods for the benefit of the community. Reddit is discovering that they can’t charge for a scarce resource they don’t own. The scarcity wasn’t internet bandwidth or servers or engineering efforts. The scarce resources were community contributions by users and mods.
I mean… contextually, it kinda has been for the past decade if you’ve been in tech.
It’s only starting to matter now because those fictional numbers are starting to become very real, very fast, given the current state of interest rates.
hmm... if only there were... I don't know... some way to offer users to pay for a quality experience and subsidize that income with advertisements and reasonable API usage fees?
no, that couldn't possibly work! I mean, look at Wikipedia...
Tech companies over hired for ~10 years wrt efficiency & sustainability, and few want to do layoffs necessary to get 'good' efficiency numbers, instead just close enough that they can maybe reach non-buzzy norms in a few years, and hope things change in the meanwhile to go back to setting money on fire.
It's natural: market funded inefficient growth for years, and tech people want to feel like they are succeeding, which headcount is a power-tripping and physical metric for, even if wildly inaccurate. Cutting isn't easy either. Losing headcount makes folks want to quit, slows growth, and if as deep as needed for efficiency (which the 'standard' 10-20% cut isn't enough for), loses revenue... Which can cause a death spiral.
We have been growing purely on revenue for awhile now, and we have to remind many of our customers that we need to get paid bc we aren't (currently) doing the VC thing. Many have been trained at this point to not think that way, it's bizarre.
Amen, I really hate that era because it has turned into a land grab by those who had access to that infinite money. It eroded the web and mobile by consolidating everything into a few platforms.
I'm hopeful that if companies start making money, we will start seeing competition again.
The web is barren, the web 3.0 went nowhere and social media is an outrage machine. I'm sure it could be better.
The other major issue is that the ability to start a major reddit competitor has been regulated out of existence. Same with any other large platform. The EU especially (although the US has also done this to a lesser extent) has created regulations and laws which are near-impossible technically to fulfill, so anyone operating a new website is in violation of them if you look hard enough. And believe me for a new social media app with linking news/politics/etc stories as a major feature everyone in power will be incentivized to look as hard as possible.
> The EU especially (although the US has also done this to a lesser extent) has created regulations and laws which are near-impossible technically to fulfill
Which regulations specifically are you talking about and what makes it “near impossible technically to fulfill” them?
Twitch revenue was 2.8 Billion last year. In what way does prioritizing more revenue mean they will achieve a viable business model when they're already generating billions.
Business types want you to think they're tidying up, but most are using this zeitgeist as an opportunity for greed and the chance to shift more power away from workers.
To state the obvious, total revenue does not tell you if a company is actually making money. If operating costs exceed revenue you lose money. It doesn't matter how much revenue you're making. Given the costs required to run twitch, they are likely still losing money, not making it. Losing money is not a viable business strategy.
I am aware that revenue is not profit, we are on HN after all.
While it is possible to run a company at a loss with extremely high revenue, contextually, you're making excuses for a company that could easily keep running with 2.8 Billion dollars yearly.
It's likely that after they extract more money from creators they will increase their spend more to maintain operating at a loss. At what point does it end?
If your claim is "2.8 billion in revenue is enough to run twitch profitably", I'd love to see the numbers backing that up. What's the cost of serving videos, acquiring advertisers, etc.
If you're making 2.8 billion in Revenue with no profit on a Twitch-like product, that's a you problem, not the creators problem. They already extract a ton of money from creators and generate revenue with ads. Twitch is spamming ads like it's TV in the 90's.
Without knowing the operating costs your sentence really makes no sense, this single number doesn't matter, what matters is its relation to the operating costs.
That's not a new trend, though. It's the bait-and-switch startup ecosystem has been built around for over a decade now.
There may, however, be some underlying trend that's the reason why so many social media companies are pulling the bait-and-switch right now, simultaneously.
This is a very stupid question - but can someone explain what the "interest rates" and "no more free money" replies mean? Is it because reddit isn't profitable so relies on constant money supply from investors? Or is it something else
Ahh, thank you. That helps a lot. I suppose it's interesting that the return from companies is even remotely comparable to the return from bonds. That's probably a dumb realization but I don't know much about this stuff.
Not dumb, this stuff isn't really taught unless you explicitly pursue it.
One note: the return on some companies may be higher and others lower, the issue is that the risk for money in companies is higher.
Very simplistic example: the US government can offer you a flat 5%, a company investment offers 10% half the time, 0% the other half.
One is a sure thing, one is a gamble. The more the 'gamble' the more risk and that is a driving factor in investments. People are willing to take huge risks if the payoff is very large (Look at Michael Burry and the big short)
You can roughly calculate yield from a stock investment. If a stock has a P/E ratio of 20 (i.e. the value of all stocks issued is 20x its annual earnings), divide 72/20 to get a yield of 3.6%. If US government bonds offer 1% yield this stock looks like a deal, but when safer government bonds yield 4% this stock now looks unattractive.
Of course this is a gross oversimplification: earnings can grow, stocks can pay dividends, companies can go bankrupt, and companies have to pay their own bondholders as well as stockholders. But hopefully it shows that a tradeoff between stocks and bonds does exist.
Bonds are much less risky too. So when interest rates were low, it made sense for investors to put money into companies because with bonds you got a tiny return guaranteed vs a high risk but potentially large payoff.
Now, bonds are guaranteeing a 5%+ return, so a non-profitable business is much less attractive as a proposition.
Actually, the Fed sets the Federal Funds Rate, which is the rate at which commercial banks borrow and lend their extra reserves to one another overnight. Increasing the Federal Funds Rate increases borrowing costs across the board, which subsequently will tend to decrease the money supply.
I believe that U.S. bonds are priced at the market.
It's not all about rich people switching their portfolios around. When rates rise, operating expenses for companies go up, and so they pass that cost down. This is a bigger deal for companies perennially in debt than startups.
> Is it because reddit isn't profitable so relies on constant money supply from investors? Or is it something else
Roughly.. but more accurately even if they are profitable they are not profitable enough.
Its not just that Reddit (Twitter, Twitch[0], etc) needs the money, the investors likely also have loans that need to be repaid sooner-than-later (or just other places with better returns). As such there is a large push for higher short term profit, to get higher short term share price, to "diversify" some of their Reddit stock.
The reality is none of these people care about the long term of Reddit. They have effectively "pumped it", they now need a good way to quickly "dump it". I'm sure none of them have any explicit motivation to destroy Reddit's future cash flows in the process, but that long term health is definitely not their focus.
[0] Twitch as an Amazon subsidiary doesn't exactly fit this model. However, the execs within Amazon do have Profit targets to meet for their orgs. This directly reflects in their bonuses, size of orgs, etc. So likely a similar enough analog.
The Federal Reserve, the central bank of the United States, has been raising interest rates very aggressively for the past year and a half to fight inflation. This has ended a very long-lived policy of near-zero interest rates which has been in place since 2009, the Great Financial Crisis.
When you borrow money from the bank, i.e. to fund the operations of a money-losing site like Reddit, ultimately the interest rate you pay on that loan is affected by the interest rates set by the Federal Reserve.
While interest rates were near zero, investors in money-losing companies like Reddit could justify just borrowing more money to keep the companies going, as the money was cheap.
But now with higher interest rates, the investors in Reddit, and other money-losing ventures, can no longer afford to just borrow more money to make up for the money they lost last year, they actually have to show a return or at least cut the losses to a level that the investor will tolerate. That means monetizing everything they can.
So this is more along the lines of what I was thinking, where borrowed money had higher interest, but many other replies in this thread make it seem like because treasury bills are better people are just investing in that instead.
Is it both of these factors combined? Is it more one factor than the other?
Based on your comment I think you may be missing one aspect:
The money you get lent at the bank is the money people are investing.
Both of the things you describe in this comment are two halves of a market. There's someone borrowing money and someone lending money. The borrowing becomes more expensive because the lender has better alternatives.
Ahhh, do you know what's funny is after I wrote that comment I went to the bathroom and while peeing I basically had the intuition they were 2 halves of the same thing, but I couldn't even articulate it. I was going to come back and try to ask again and I saw this comment. Thanks!
All this stuff I've tried to learn a few times and it's just so open ended, my mind is very more technically oriented and vague hand-waving statements on investopedia drives me crazy. Other people seem to understand it so easily but after the multiple attempts that I have made, I just have given up.
3 month T-Bills are 5.2% (was .04%). 2 years are 4.7% (was .15%). Hypothetical future profit for companies that have been around for 10+ years is no longer good enough.
Rates are low: I can borrow money at 1% interest and my bank pays me 0.1% interest on any money I leave in my account. I'm getting basically no return on my money in the bank, so it makes sense to start a project that might make me money. If I have to borrow money, I only need to make a 1% return for it to be worth it.
Rates are high: It now costs 7% to borrow money and my bank pays me 4% on any money I leave in my account. 4% is a decent return and if I borrow money I need need a project that returns >7% for it to be worth it. Leaving my money in the bank seems like a much better option now.
How this applies to Reddit: VCs and investors are trying to figure out which projects are worth putting more money into, but the bar to make an investment worth it is much higher. Reddit (and many other companies) now need to show that giving them money is more profitable than leaving money in the bank (or other "safe" investments).
Imagine you could have $1 now or x 1 year from now. How big would x have to be in order for you to prefer it?
Well, if you were planning on buying a $1 savings bond at a 2% interest rate than x would have to be 1.02 or bigger. If the interest rate increased then x would need to increase as well. In other words, an increase in the interest rate is a decrease in the future value of money - it takes more future dollars to be worth the same amount of present dollars.
When interest rates are low, companies prefer earning money in the future. They prefer growth. When interest rates are high then companies shift their preference to present dollars. What we are seeing is companies choosing to pursue money now rather than money in the future because of what interest rates are doing.
Discord also is in the process of asking 200 million users (monthly active as of 2023) to change their username, previous ones they will inevitably lose due to the uniqueness requirement, something nobody seems to have ever asked and might be unheard of on this scale. There's a few other examples of platforms going against their users too. It definitely seems to be an industry-wide movement, perhaps racing to be ahead of the changing economic climate with very poorly though out, short sighted steps, possibly to maximize revenue. (on paper, as advertised by some management before being approved and put into motion, but some corpos might still get away with it)
discord is most likely well-aware of the criticism that it's an unsearchable black-hole and that people are nonetheless bashing it into being a docs/wiki system despite the poor product fit.
when your customers start doing weird shit with your product, they're telling you what they want the product to be, and as a result discord is pivoting towards being a forum or at least having the option for communities to have public wikis/forums associated with them.
this is probably only intensified now that reddit is teetering in the middle of their own pivot and leaving this opening for low-friction community building. like why not have a reddit replacement for the public content, built on top of the discord communities that already exist?
but, reddit with non-unique usernames would kinda suck, wouldn't it? to make a global public forum work, you have to require that they're unique and migrate the existing usernames to the new schema somehow.
You don't have to use the new username, discord's legacy functionality isn't forcing you, but if you don't you probably won't get access to disreddit features when it launches, because replying to paulmd#0069 on a reddit-clone would be an awful experience.
but the reason the username change is happening "even though nobody asked for it" is very simple. nobody is asking for username changes, but lots of people are asking for discord to step into the gap that reddit is leaving, and provide more powerful public-facing tooling for non-ephemeral content that's searchable and discoverable. And unique usernames are kind of a mandatory part of that model.
I haven't really used Lemmy/Mastodon much but it seems like an inherent disadvantage of that model too. weedgoku69@mastodon.social is not the same user as weedgoku69@masty.me and people will have to get used to the idea of looking at the whole username rather than reddit's unique usernames.
It's also going to be tough when there's not a 1:1 correspondence between "subreddits" and the discords underneath them. I guess your discord.gg URL is now your canonical subreddit URL... hope you boosted your server and squatted that custom invite URL a couple years ago, because it's your "domain name" now!
> What's going on? What's the bigger trend that's causing all these platforms to go so user-hostile?
These companies need/want to start making money. Either due to investors wanting a return on their investment (Reddit IPO, Amazon buying Twitch), or poor decisions which have lead to lots of debt (Elon buying Twitter). Companies can't get free/cheap loans any more since interest rates are high.
Many of these social media companies all followed the tried-and-true "embrace, extend, extinguish" methodology... Offer a free/cheap product until you gain the network effect that kills your competitors, then crank up the prices to turn a profit.
Inflation and rising interest rates sure seem like they can explain so much of the puzzle... especially timing.
But Twitter is an especially interesting piece of that puzzle. It seems to be immolating itself in a deliberate enshitification, closely mirroring every other mega site - yet I doubt it can be related to debt in any way.
I don’t think we can just shrug and chalk it up to a poor decision by eccentric Elon, either. There are only a handful of mega sites. Some (Meta) have had bots between users for a long time. Some (TikTok) were born that way. The rest, including Twitter, seem hellbent on racing to get bots between us as fast as they can.
I think this undermines the debt-urgency argument. I suspect it, instead, highlights a recent growth spurt in the market value for mega sites with bots between users. We’re getting bots everywhere, not because time’s up and bots were the best idea they had, but because bots are exploding in value. We might even look back and shake our heads because Elon so clearly underpaid for Twitter.
VC money has dried out, platforms suddenly try to extract money, and they go at it way ham-fisted with little rhyme, reason, or respect for the user base.
economy has changed to where money is harder to get, and investors are probably much more skeptical now. and in order to get profitable, they have to start some user-hostile practices.
> The biggest Reddit communities are in open rebellion
No, the __mods__ of __some__ of the biggest Reddit communities are in rebellion. Of the top 20 subreddits by subscribers, only 6 are currently closed. For the most part, the users of those subreddits dgaf about this issue, and even if the mods hold these subreddits hostage forever, the users will just move on to some similar subreddit that will take its place. The only loss here will be in smaller subreddits where some mod takes their toys home and nobody cares enough to start up something similar, and in that case, it's honestly not a big loss to reddit.
Even though there are some giant subreddits that will probably all return, those are the least interesting part of Reddit. I feel like even the people who just want to scroll memes and rage content on the big subreddits still get a lot of value out of a few smaller subreddits related to their hobbies.
I feel like that’s what made Reddit special compared to TikTok or others, was that you could join those niche areas that were specific to you. Reddit still has the same garbage as other internet sites, but you could also find the really interesting and insightful content related to your hobbies.
And in many of my niches specifically, almost entirely the mods have resigned from those smaller communities. And since I’m not interested in the rage memes of the major subreddits, Reddit has nothing for me at this point.
But even the people who do like that stuff, I would guess also have their own niche hobbies that they enjoy, and if that part of Reddit goes away then they might as well just be on TikTok or whatever. And then why would they stay on Reddit when it’s so similar to those others?
To phrase more elegantly: the big subreddits may have the bulk of content, and will probably still be around. But the long tail of tiny subreddits is what made it interesting, and it would take a gargantuan effort for Reddit to restore the community of all of those little subreddits that are individually only valuable to a few, but everyone has some tiny subreddits that are really important to them.
It seems there's an interesting lever presented in the article: comment about the support being provided to the platform that is so adversely affecting the users so that the advertisers are exposed more directly to the impact.
Reddit has become pretty popular in India and this new population is okay with new site and policy changes because they simply are not aware of what Reddit use to be. Reddit blackout has almost 0 effect on Indian subreddits. Reddit still has numbers to show even if most subreddit are down.
Just check r/India r/Mumbai r/Banglore r/Delhi r/Pune and other India subreddits and you will see.
Is this sarcastic or am I missing some point? More users == more money, and India is the biggest under-tapped single market in social media, if you consider it a "single market". I don't get why being popular in India would be a bad thing...
Investors do not care about just DAUs (daily active users) anymore, they care just as much about ARPU (avg revenue per user)
At Facebook, users from Asia Pacific region monetize at around ~1/15th of US&CA users. The costs to serve those users remains relatively fixed on a per-user basis, so expect those costs to inflate by 10-15x to earn the same revenue. Will Reddit drastically change their business model to appeal to Asia Pacific users and advertisers? It's possible but extremely unlikely and pivoting your business model months from IPO isn't a good plan.
A flood of India users to a western-centric platform is how you kill that platform (see Quora).
Thanks, well explained! I get that. Your last sentence definitely makes me sad, I guess we have a ways to go to meaningfully achieve the goals of the internet - perhaps LLM-enhanced translation auto-integrated into all the major browsers will help with that…
What happened to Quora happened to YouTube, Instagram, WhatsApp as well. They are not dying. I'm pretty sure they are earning good or they would have exit the market long ago.
Yeah, at a high level more users == more money, but not all users are created equal.
Indian users cost the same as US users in operational load but are worth a fraction of the advertising revenue.
As long as they are net positive it’s good for reddit, but the fact that reddit was struggling to make money on the biggest margin users does not bode well.
didn't check lately but r/india used to be all about doing a "walkout" on india by nri or those who wanted to become one. i hope that now the discourse is more represented by the people in the country than out of it.
FYI, The Independent redirects based on location. I am not surprised to learn that Bill Cosby has been sued by 9 women in Nevada, but that's probably not what you wanted me to read about.
If the link is changed, it would be better to do it to an archive version. Here's one: https://archive.is/NcsuT
Now that the initial 48 hours have passed, I would expect Reddit to override this at any moment now.
Any subreddits which had not been private previously will revert back to public and the ability to change from public to private will be temporarily disabled.
It's one thing for management to wait out 48h (doable), it's another thing to wait out something "indefinite".
I think even reddit is not arrogant enough to attempt that. It would require removing every moderator from every subreddit that has gone private at the same time.
Even if reddit forces subreddit's public, the auto-mod script to remove all new comments and posts is 2 lines of YAML. Having a public site with a bunch of upset and unaccountable mods is only inviting them to become bad actors and actively sabotage the site, which will do much much more damage than going private
I don't disagree with you, but this does seem like a pretty obvious move for Reddit.
I don't think Reddit cares about appeasing moderators. Though with or without this move it will be very interesting to see what will happen to Reddit if there is a mass exodus of moderators. Moderation is IMO the hardest problem in social media, all other platforms (Twitter, Facebook, etc) are objectively terrible at it. Reddit on the other hand with moderation at the micro level vs macro level seems to work. But its 100% on the backs of charitable time from unpaid users. If that falls apart, I can see it having a devastating effect on Reddit as a whole.
I guess it depends on how they do it. If reddit simply asks mods to step down and let others apply if they don't like the new rules, then it takes away some of heated rhetoric.
There's not going to be a populist revolt against Reddit stopping angry mods from destroying their communities and/or actively siphoning them to other sites. The people who are already angry may get angrier, but they're already leaving so who cares?
Once you've chosen Exit as your protest strategy, you lose Voice.
My point is that the marginal impact will be negligible. The people who would get angry over forced reopenings are the people that are already angry over the API changes. Why would Reddit care about upsetting the people that are already allegedly leaving the site?
I think they are too smart to override it. See the Streisand effect. If the old subreddits go permanently dark, new subreddits with mods who don't care about the protest will fill the void.
I am curious how this will all settle out in the end. I think the majority of users don’t really care about the API or subreddits going private as they primarily just lurk.
However, the people that do care are the ones that moderate and contribute the vast majority of the content that the larger group enjoys.
I am pessimistic that the minority here will win out in the end, but the majority may begin to lose interest if the quality of new content drops.
At least for myself, the blackout gave me enough space away from the site to consider if my time on Reddit was valuable/enjoyable and basically I concluded it is not worth the time. I’ve uninstalled the app and I haven’t really missed a thing.
> I think the majority of users don’t really care about the API or subreddits going private as they primarily just lurk.
I agree. These protests have missed the point. There is a (very) loud minority raising hell right now, but spez is right, it's just noise. The silent majority is still hanging around.
My bet is that quality will go up. I'm not really interested in reading what the small number of people who spend 8+ hours per day on Reddit think, about any topic. Hopefully they'll take their silly Reddit mannerisms and inside jokes with themselves on the way out.
We'll see. Reddit will not die in 2 weeks that's for sure. But some people will leave and maybe a viable alternative will surface as a result of this shifty behavior
I said it before, and I’ll say it again. This is a huge opportunity for Facebook. They sort of tried to do Reddit in the past and ended up with shitty Facebook groups.
If I were them, I would rush to add some reddit features to Facebook group (reddit-like threads, upvotes/downvotes) or try to launch something new that’s more like reddit on top of the facebook/insta social graph.
why you guys think they're doing the unique usernames? because reddit with non-unique usernames would suck.
everyone has been talking about how much discord is a blackhole for content and it's unsearchable etc. And that's really fine for the chat side of things, but people hammering it into being a wiki/documentation/etc is a sign that there's a product need not being met. Discord almost certainly knows this, but, non-unique usernames for a global community doesn't work.
It would be interesting to see Facebook Groups divorce from Facebook itself. Maybe allow people to login using an Instagram or Whatsapp identity, or better yet an independent login.
I don't really want my group activity to be linked to my Facebook identity for tracking/advertising purposes.
How is it worse? From a privacy perspective they're both terrible and the data flows to the same Meta servers, but Facebook demands you use your real name (and demands photo ID if it thinks it's fake) while Instagram doesn't care.
Are you serious? That is the most useful and well done function of Facebook!
The accounts are all mostly real names so there is much less toxicity. Instead you get enthusiasts around a topic that can discuss issues in a constructive manner - or at least more constructive than Reddit.
Yet, addicted me still occasionally opens reddit. And all the content I see is from communities that did not black out, or returned, so all the content is from communities that at least a part of my says I shouldn't want to see.
That's my experience as well. Certain subs didn't black out, disappointing me (just about everything I used did, though). I can take a peek and what I see is a smaller number that returned, and in some cases I have sympathy (certain kinds of support forum) and in some cases it permanently affected my take on the sub.
It's made me wonder why I've spent time shoveling engagement and words into the maw of a machine that didn't turn out to be the people I thought I was hanging out with. I spent a YEAR of my life traveling great distances to pursue a long-distance relationship I literally found on Reddit. That relationship turned out to not be as healthy as I wanted to believe it was…
The last 3 days I starred way to many times at the "this subreddit is private" page on reddit.
Not because I actively were using reddit but because all my search queries (not all of them with "reddit") went to one or another reddit post with the information not available anymore.
Even if reddit decides to comply, we have to change this for a better internet in the future.
Lemmy could end in a worse situation: some hobby guy hosts his lemmy instance with w/e unique subs, one day he decides it’s too much work and take it offline. Boom it’s all gone and there’s no recourse.
Here at least there’s a chance Reddit will unblock the subs if this goes on too long.
Users should consider who owns the server before investing time & energy on it. Having a nameless, headless Reddit employee control the fate of any/all communities is a far worse prospect
I'm sure it's not the only reason, but one important reason is that because they don't get their revenue from selling ads, they resisted enshittification well.
Because it makes other people (such as myself, and probably reddit management I'm guessing) think you aren't very serious and you'll come crawling back to reddit after you get bored of this protest.
Do prove me wrong, because I'd really like to see reddit die. But I'm not counting any chickens until they hatch.
I assume as long as people keep going to reddit (for whatever reason, does not really matter), reddit can show ads and make money. Reddit will only start having problems once the visitor numbers go down. So far (?) that seems not the case.
Yeah hair spray/glue stick and bed leveling lol. I bought an auto bed leveler and still can't get anything to stick/not curl up towards the nozzle.
There are those hidden gems on Reddit though that aren't the typical response, replies that suggest that your plastic filament has absorbed too much moisture and that you need to dry it in an oven.
Yeah those issues can be really frustrating. I find textured PEI sheets to be the easiest to get working, if adhesion suddenly stops being good, I first try washing with soap and water, then I try adjusting the z-offset, then drying the filament and playing with bed temperatures, curling can happen in both cases of if the temperature is too low and too high. Additionally, with corners lifting on certain prints, you might just need a brim.
I had a BLTouch for a few months, but I found it to be way more trouble than it was worth (probably mostly due to its temperature sensitivity and the heated enclosure). I ended up switching over to a Klackender probe, which has been more reliable to me.
Try a Garolite Bed. Get a sheet about 1 to 2mm thick. Yes, that is PCB material. It is fantastic!
Use the smaller sized office clamps to hold it in place. These can be placed on a few sides. Check that they do not collide with your printhead.
Then, prep it with a light ScotchBrite scrub. Just enough to see the light abrasive marks and a bit of texture in the surface. Finish with high purity isopropyl and a dry cloth buff. If you want, you can do prep away from the machine. I do because I disturb the level less. You can use a fresh, green type found in the grocery store for cleaning dishes, and or the more industrial purple. Just need to scuff the surface a tiny bit.
That gets rid of dust, oils and such. And the light abrasive gives the polymer a better mechanical bond.
Set your bed height to about one half of your nozzle diameter.
0.4 nozzle = 0.2mm bed to nozzle tip distance. Ordinary weight printer paper is about this amount.
Level your bed using the paper at all four extents. You should feel just a bit of drag resistance between nozzle and paper.
For most PLA, heat the bed to 65, maybe 70C and set your first layer height to half your nozzle diameter. 0.2mm again.
I like to print a skirt around the part to let flow settle before the first layer is made.
No glue stick, hairspray or anything needed.
Gatolite grips many other polymers when warm, releases nicely when cool.
I prefer G10 type.
For glass, do all the same things, skip the scotchbrite and add pvb gluesick in an even coating in the region your part will be. Let it sit a bit with bed at temp, then kick off your print.
Regarding wet filament, it can cause some problems. If you doubt your filament, you can quick dry some. Unspool a few meters, turn your bed heater on, set to 50C and lay it on there. Cover with light foil, put a small hole in the middle, wait an hour, then try printing with it. You want the foil just sitting over the filament, but not tight. Some light airflow is good to carry moisture away. It will come in through the sides and out the hole.
Use exact same settings to troubleshoot this moisture idea. If it sticks, dry your filament. If no change, your problem is not moisture.
That same idea applies to everything. You need to isolate problems to materials, settings, machine, environment, etc...
All this assumes some open bed type home machine, like a Prusa, or Creality type.
Once you do get adhesion, archive that gcode and process. When you have trouble again, pull that filament out, repeat exact process again to baseline your setup.
Always baseline when introducing a new idea.
I like to use some little cubes, say 9 of them, spread across the build surface. Run that job, make sure it sticks, then run parts. A good baseline takes roughly an hour, maybe a bit less once you have done it a few times.
Some notes about my setup: Ender 3 v2 (textured glass bed), added a CR Touch, swapped out the bronze for a hardened steel nozzle, and installed Klipper firmware. I have PLA, PLA+, and PETG, I dried the PETG at I think 140F (convection oven) for 6ish hours, and then was finally able to print a Benchy boat if I set my first layer print speed to 5-10mm/s. I tried to print something that had small shapes on the first layer (small circles for a bolt to go into) with no luck. I was never able to get PLA or PLA+ to print, now even with the same gcode I can't get PETG to lay down properly. Eventually it just curls up towards the nozzle, then gets dragged and clogs. Can't even print a raft. The only adhesive I have tried so far is a mixture of wood glue and water. I've cleaned the bed with soap, acetone, alcohol, you name it.
I live in a very humid state, but I wouldn't expect my PETG to reabsorb moisture in the 2ish days after I dried it, can't print a Benchy or even just one of those single layer square tests you use for testing your leveling.
I just soaked basically my entire printhead/extruder/nozzle in acetone to clean it out, I tried doing cold pulls with all 3 materials, but the filament would just snap off instead of give me that clean nozzle shape you are supposed to get.
All that info. doesn't really inform my question for you, but I kind of wanted to rant a little bit :)
Is G10 better than say a textured PEI sheet for first layer adhesion? Ideally I would like to primarily print everything in PETG for its physical characteristics (heat, water, strength). Is it true that G10 can easily be gouged by the nozzle? I am a bit worried by that considering the cheapest I can find a G10 sheet for on amazon is $30.
There is a PTFE tube in there that's supposed to help guide the filament and it is damaged. If you can't do a cold pull nothing will work because the shape of the filament will change inside the feed path and it will bind up.
Some hot ends do not have the PTFE tube, but they have metal parts that must be mated together precisely in order for the polymer to flow through. If there are gaps the polymer flows into those forms little nuggets and it can't work.
If I were you I would replace your hot end, and make sure your feed path is factory spec all the way through and try again. Clean the feeder gears, make sure you got nice Boden tube on there, the whole thing.
Pet polymers take on water very slowly. And many plas will work whether they're wet or dry. I do not believe that's your problem. If you've got super aggressive Snap Crackle Pop when purging some material through maybe. But I would look elsewhere first.
If I were you, I would also get a known setup that just prints a 1-in cube. And work that until it's perfect.
The Telltale here is the curling up around the nozzle and the clogging. Your machine can't sustain a flow rate. Once the filament is moving it's okay but once it stops part of it is solidifying in there and preventing movement from then on.
Once you get it all working, if you have replaced your hot end, you can then compare that one to the one you have now and probably fix it.
The cold pull is with the PTFE tubing taken out but yeah, I didn't realize how cheap it was to replace/upgrade the hot end, I will just do that. Thanks for the tip!
Also, with those materials there's no need for the steel nozzle or the hardening. They will work fine with the brass nozzle, and I would use a new one.
I have used glass garolite pei and a number of other things.
The garolite and the Pei are similar. I prefer the G10 because it's stiffer and it doesn't wear away as easily and it seems to be a little more consistent in how it behaves. But either can work.
Based on that, Lemmy seems to be the most reasonable alternative. Can't believe collapsible comments is so rare, that's the main thing (aside from voting) making gigantic comment chains readable.
The more useful thing to users would be a list of alternatives for each closed subreddit. No reddit alternative is going to grow to anything useful from this.
Why not? Typically users of reddit are subscribed to more than one subreddit, so migration to a single destination that can handle all of those communities seems like an obvious choice. The network effect of many users advocating that their second favourite community migrate over to the "new reddit" seems reasonable once people start to establish a userbase there.
I'm starting to enjoy federation conversations here just as much as crypto conversations.
I'm so sick of the smug ones, the people saying the protest is useless, the completely missing-the-point statement that most users don't care, and the near gleeful self abuse of people mocking others that don't want to keep using a proprietary platform being sold to china by a liar.
I'm done with Reddit threads on HN. I recommend folks interested in federated networks move these conversations there and let the rest enjoy reddit as it turns into digg.
The "major" subreddits you listed are ranked #74, #76, #77, #4020, #946, #165, #875, #2324, and #1584 by posts per day. The claim that they are "keeping reddit alive basically" is rather generous.
Yeah that's where I took the stats from. I spot checked them a bit to see if that metric seemed like it was affected by the recent blackout, but it looked like it wasn't (maybe they lag by some number of days). You could take the #users instead which shouldn't be affected by the blackout, but I thought posts better reflected how much activity they were producing (the first couple listed were really low on users but much higher on posts), but really I think for any of the metrics you pick will make the "keeping reddit alive" claim look rather questionable.
I can’t figure out r/sports’s moderation rules. Every now and then I will accidentally reply there because something bubbles up to my front page. I discovered 90% of my comments there get deleted without explanation.
A proposal to address the failures of extant options:
Users hold their own data in the account they use for SSO
Every comment post etc is in your own account, with sites putting a request in the page from your SSO host
The front page is defined by your choice of site or SSO provider.
Eg I have a site and users can login with Google or make an account with my SSO provider, when they post a reference pointer is stored and the content is "reported" to the SSO provider by both the client and server with only those items reported by both being "validated" and stored. When site serves page with that content it puts in a js snippet that pulls the content item from the appropriate server.
This means users have full control over their content, sites don't have to host as much content, SSO services have better monetization options (Subs or Sales of Data Analysis) while sites don't lose thiers, etc
Subforums would just be different servers/sites, with your chosen frontend aggregating them all like a new age interactive RSS
People are treating this as if this is the Reddit of 2011. If you really think this protest is going to stop the momentum of a Reddit IPO payout you are sorely mistaken.
I personally don't care one way or the other about any reddit IPO payout. Happy for them if they get paid, reddit has been an amazing service for many many years.
What I DO care about is being able to browse without ads and recommendations I don't want shoved down my throat. They could have done things in a way that preserved 3rd party clients but required payment for an ad-free experience. People would be mostly fine with that I think.
The main problem with the protest is that there’s no viable Reddit replacement. Back during the Digg fiasco, it was easy for everyone to jump ship to Reddit.
I wondered about that myself - isn't a subreddit just ("just") a forum with 1) threaded comments like HN and 2) the ability to sort by upvotes? phpBB + a few addons might go a long way to replicating that, it just takes some effort.
There's also the other aspect of combining multiple forums into one cohesive website, which mostly isn't solvable by old school forum software. For that we need a federation scheme or even just old fashioned webrings to start with.
>Large communities can't meaningfully migrate off it.
Yes they can, Digg migrated to reddit, Facebook migrated to Instagram. If Reddit becomes insufferable for most of their users to use they will migrate. Never forget the internet 1% rule [1], just the right set of users have to migrate to kill the site.
it's not enough to be marginally better. you need to be a LOT better to overcome network effects and activation energy.
reddit became substantially better when digg ruined their product. actually, digg didn't work at all when they rolled out their new version, so it was (approximately) infinitely better.
Some large communities have migrated by force previously. Not that it's any good, but communities.win (or whatever they go by now) does seem to have maintained its population of right-wing refugees, /r/drama seems to be keeping their own site afloat. /r/startrek set up their own Lemmy instance, so we'll see how that goes over time.
There is really no reason to comment if your vote is to shut down the sub. The position is already known and well described. What would the posts be? "I agree"?
Vs if you want the sub to stay open and are against the shutdown, your position is not obvious, and has value in explaining why you are against it.
I agree with your point but there definitely is some brigading going on by the "pro-blackout" crowd. I moderate a small-ish subreddit (~6500 subscribers) and while our poll to blackout received overwhelming support including from well-known members in our community, I definitely noticed that after sharing in the /r/ModCoord thread our intent to blackout the thread started receiving a lot of supporting comments from questionable brand new accounts (or accounts with low karma/had never interacted with the community before). And this was without linking the thread at all - these users were clearly coming to the subreddit, finding the post and making pro-blackout comments to push the community towards a shutdown.
It's already ended for several subreddits. Several are in limbo of deciding what they want to do next, so it's not well coordinated.
I'll say it again, this is the equivalent of a change.org petition.
Unless all of say the top 10 (maybe more) subreddits completely, indefinitely went private - this will do nothing. There's not enough weight to it.
And even then, Reddit could just wait it out. People who really want X subreddit will just make a new one with a similar name. That happens regardless on almost a daily basis. Most of the major subreddits have a half-dozen alts.
As for alternatives to Reddit as a site, that's not going anywhere fast. What makes Reddit Reddit is not the tech, it's the content. Alternatives can exist that seem nearly as good on paper, but unless a sizable number of users go there, it means nothing.
And most users do not care about this API situation. It's a very vocal, very small minority.
This may be an unresolvable problem. Or rather, more specifically: a problem solvable via load-shedding, which is what Reddit is now (tacitly) encouraging.
Reading between the lines: Reddit is charging money for 3rd-party integration. The Reddit community has interpreted this as greedy (or, more specifically: the mods community has interpreted this as "We will have to start paying money to use services that are necessary for us to mod our subreddits"). But Reddit has not backed down. What if they can't? What if the problem is that the cost to provide the bulk-data API accesses is starting to add up for Reddit itself?
If so, then the problem is hosting Reddit has become too expensive and one solution is, indeed, to make it cheaper by having fewer high-traffic subreddits.
Reddit told the Apollo developer the API pricing was more opportunity cost than actual cost. And many people suggested Reddit could make 3rd party access a subscription feature.
Just at first glance, and maybe there's a better way to get this data (I guess not anymore with the API changes!), but if you just look at upvotes on popular posts it seems like nothing has changed in terms of how many people are engaged with the site. At a glance, I doubt the blackouts have had any impact on their DAU or concurrency. New subreddits will likely form to replace the permanently blacked out ones, but just like Twitter, all these addicts aren't going to leave, they'll just have a worse experience but carry on. After all, the good fight against the evil Reddit corporation... is taking place almost entirely on Reddit.
Would it be possible to create a read-only instance that was federated with every single other instance? Possibly there is already one or it's been tried and didn't work but the way I envision it is this -
You sign up to the read-only instance and can see the entire fediverse's contents and posts and when/if you wanted to comment, the app would let you know that you had to sign up to the instance the comment came from to post your own comment and take you that instance's sign-up page.
One of the biggest turn-offs for me was finding which ones to join and/or had content I was or might be interested in.
I quit /r/pics long time ago because 90% of the images were political. Instead there is /r/nocontextpics/ (which is also currently in restricted mode) which is what /r/pics used to be a long time ago.
Once enough of those get created, it would probably be more harmful to Reddit if the mods then opened up their original subreddits. Now users have to pick between /r/foo and /r/foo_unlocked. Communities are fragmented.
Powerjannies probably aren't too worried. Most users will choose the r/foo instead of foo_unlocked especially in the 6-month+ timespan.
Building some community of 1000 people is a complete waste of time, if it starts to get traction the powerjannies will unlock their own communities and maintain their personal power/influence.
There simply is no circumstance where building a replacement community to bypass the powerjannies' control will be a worthwhile use of anyone's time.
If there is a feeling that this is a loud minority waving pitchforks and that subreddits that re-open largely go on unaffected... the move to bypass the minority has to come from reddit themselves, otherwise the powerjannies will just regroup and come at it a bit more subtly once they realize they're on the losing side. They ain't gonna give up that mod slot when they know how much personal power it affords them.
And people can say there isn't power in it, or they're in it for the community, but, this kind of "keeping it closed for everyone because some users don't want it to be open" is exactly the kind of thing that gets a powermod all bricked up. There's enough power for some people to get a thrill out of it.
The current protest falls into a perceived gap in the "inactive sub" rules - if a sub is inactive and the mods are gone, that sub can be reassigned to new mods and reopened. The mods are saying "no, we're not inactive... we're just not letting anyone talk, but, there's 1 post a week in a private thread, see?". And the reality is that even if you accept that's a valid gap in the rules (arguably this is already covered by mod reassignment rules) this certainly will not be allowed to persist forever, Reddit will simply change the rules around what constitutes abandonment. The pressure is already on from community members who don't feel represented and are willing to take over the mod work if the current mods simply no longer wish to mod under the new system:
You can protest at the factory gate all you want, and shame people for "crossing the picket line". You can't obstruct the actual factory floor, and if that happens the cops will remove you. And that's what things are fast coming to with the whole situation.
Mods are free to not mod. Users are free to not post. That's the "protest at the gate" approach. You can't be disruptive on a commercial platform, or you're gonna get removed. If mods no longer wish to participate and abandon the platform, Reddit is perfectly free to execute its "abandoned subreddit" procedures and reopen the sub, or to alter those abandoned-subreddit procedures in any way they want. If users/mods wish to behave in a disruptive fashion because they don't want to be members anymore, they will be banned.
And yes, there are people willing to step in and do the work too. Powermods are not that special, actually they're kinda awful at times.
Why not just stop moderating and let the subs go to shit and naturally let people move? Why take away valuable information from everyone? Most of us don't care about your fight with Reddit.
The biggest issue is that it doesn't seem like these subreddits are doing anything beyond closing down.
Point people to an alternative. Not just in the vague direction of The Lemmiverse or Squabbles or whatever; if your sub is going dark, you should have somewhere to receive all your refugees.
Even better if the mods coordinate so that all subs are pointing to the same place(s).
Even a shared Discord would have been a big step up imo.
This might be an ignorant question but why can't Reddit "force" the blackouts the end? Is it because they risk losing a moderation team to manage the content? Because even if that's true, it seems far less consequential to replace the moderators than the potential of another competitor usurping their position.
Doesn't sound that bad, I hope they do it. And word on the street is they've started. I'm not really sure why they have to even ban the mods. Just tell them it's over and ask them if they want to resign, and keep an eye on them incase they misbehave.
I didn't say ban, I said remove, not that I think there's much of a difference. I hope they do it too, although I expect for entirely different reasons than you do. Funny to see "Reddit Delenda Est" come full circle in a way.
I think mods might be a bit like members of US Congress. I expect that if you asked redditors if they think the mods on reddit are good, they'd say no...unless you asked them if the mods of the subreddits they use are good, in which case they'd say yes. Not convinced that removing the mods and reactivating the subs will go as well as you seem to.
This doesn't sound like a problem to me? Moderators are random volunteers from the public, not Reddit employees. Feels like it should be trivial and easy to dismiss and replace them. Not like they can file a labor dispute with the company...
1. Reddit is a private company and if you don't like their practices then maybe you want to stop using their services.
2. There is nothing stopping people who don't care about this to create new and similar subreddit.
New people will take over or create new subreddits as most users don't care. Same thing with Twitter - some people leave and new people get ore engagements and fill the gap.
Truth is, 99% of the user base doesn't care and hates the mods anyhow.
as a selfish, passive consumer of reddit content without partaking in even voting, i just want to enjoy the threads already out there.
i see the arguments and i wonder why the way to protest is not to just stop participating, rather than taking down the subreddit. if moderation is hard without the third-party apps, stop doing it?
to my understanding, the mods want to preserve their powers and the subreddits' integrity. so prolonging the blackout does not seem much more effective to me than the initial publicity in tech media. especially if people running the site understand the above point.
This is like the mirror opposite of how VCs burn money to create new behaviors. Eventually the protest (wasteful burning) creates new behaviors that shape the world into one's desired image.
I’m not sure how this protest accomplished anything?
If people blackout subreddits and Reddit continues to chug along nicely with ad revenue isn’t it just proving that Reddit doesn’t need the users who are upset?
I think if this were really a threat to Reddit’s bottom line they wouldn’t allow subreddits to exist entirely for the purpose of coordinating the protest.
Social media is one of those bizarre parts of the internet. If one social media site becomes unpopular, literally everyone will just leave and go to another one. Friendster, Myspace, Facebook, all abandoned once something "cooler" came around, and nobody wants to sit around on a platform none of their friends are on.
That said, I could really give a crap if any of these sites goes away. I'm only here for the articles, and these sites aren't generating them, they're just linking them.
All reddit has to do is remove the ability for subreddits to be private. Or put the ability to make subreddits private behind a paywall. Much like how Github treated private repos.
End of the day, reddit is going to have to figure out how many users are willing to boycott. Moderators are one thing. They are a minority. But if they remove the ability for /r/funny to be private, would users honor the protest?
The subs that have ended their blackouts are going on like nothing happened.
A single power. And I don't think it's a power all mods have. If it is, it would only take one rogue mod to re-public the subreddit.
And really, whether or not the mods continue to moderate is the thing being tested with such a move. Reddit did the API thing, the mods responded by escalating to this. Reddit can either blink and walk back some of their choices, wait for the mods to blink and reopen (of which, some have already), or reddit can escalate further and see if that makes the mods blink.
I believe a non-zero number of mods will continue to moderate. I also believe there are more than enough people willing to moderate to replace any of those who refuse to return.
Then you have weird situations. Because I'm willing to believe that some people believe it is extraordinarily difficult to moderate a subreddit and that they are uniquely gifted at it. Some of these people will believe that they have to moderate the subreddit because they believe the community will go to shit without them. Others will believe that their replacements will cause the community go to shit and Tim Reddit himself will come begging them to rejoin the moderation team.
And neither of these things are true. Moderating a forum is mostly drudgery and the only real skill it takes is having the time to do so. This is a battle I don't think the current mods can ultimately win.
If Reddit opens up private subs without their mods, spammers and trolls will obliterate the subs for trivial profits or to teach the former mods a lesson, and there won't be anything left for users to trash.
Virtually all the useful information about Notion is in the reddit group, which is now inaccessible. I sent a message to the group's moderators today "come on guys, this is dumb" and they reported me for harassment
I can’t take the protesters seriously. Of course they’re not a homogeneous group, but among the protesters, I’m seeing way too many pro-capitalists who are actually just middle class and who are protesting against exactly what a good capitalist would do.
I hope the admins of reddit will start taking control of the closed subs and opening them up. The content of each one of those subs has been written by the users and it makes no sense that a handful of mods are taking the content and holding it hostage by keeping the subs private. If I were a contributor to one of those subs (for example by posting answers to programming questions) I would be fuming.
Across many subreddits, the announcements to participate in the blackout were highly upvoted (>90%), while announcements against participation were heavily downvoted.
only a handful of subscribers voted in each of these polls. And we know that the most motivated people cared enough to vote, the vast majority of people do not care about this
There were a lot of people protesting the protest in r/modCoord but they started banning them
Polls I saw were very active for their groups. People who opposed going private has equal opportunity to vote. People who abstained abstained. More important votes are decided all the time by the people who cared enough to vote.
r/modCoord has negative comments minutes to days old. Criticism is not banned evidently. How did the banned protest the protest? Are the protesting moderators allowed any moderation of their coordination channels in your mind?
> Are the protesting moderators allowed any moderation of their coordination channels in your mind
No idea it is their channel
The issue is, they should not be allowed to coordinate site-wide. The whole point of subreddits is to have separate competing communities, not to coordinate.
Letting users create a database of knowledge with the premise that it will be available and then massively deleting (or hiding) that knowledge is abusive. The admins of reddit haven't done so (yet). The day they do it I will call them out for it, but by now, it's the mods.
I personally contend that the official Reddit app has already hidden that knowledge. And that it is abusive. As do many others. We are overwhelmed by the urgent imminence of deliberate enshitification. Waiting to be “surprised” is insanity at this point.
I’m not having a fun time with this blackout, but Reddit will be effectively blacked out for me the moment old.reddit goes away. I might as well try changing my diet now, if I’m otherwise going to be forced to change it anyway once doing nothing different leads to diabetes in the near future.
I don’t own my contributions any more than the mods do. My contributions exist only in the context of moderated mass discussion, and in the context of mass audience participation. All broad changes to the context of this collaboration are abusive… and I’m throwing my lot in with the abuses of the mods doing blackout right now.
So that everybody can exploit the content. When you post comments and threads on a public message board, you are giving it away for free with the expectation that it will be available for the whole world to see. It has been like this since the beginning. Since Usenet, phpBB and everything in between up until now.
Should librarians be allowed to close public libraries and make them an exclusive club because they work there and have been organizing the shelves?
That's a strike, fine. What about closing the library with all books inside and only allowing their friends in, like in my example? What about burning down the library?
As many people have recently noted, Reddit quietly became an extremely important repository of text-based knowledge. Distinct from Wikipedia and Archive.org, but no less important, Reddit is full of valuable procedural (how-to) and consumer (product-related) knowledge. Reddit has countless small communities built around hobbies and other niche interests, which places it in the same role once fulfilled by Usenet and later independent web-based forums.
While those technologies still exist, they face enormous challenges with discovery (try to find a new forum on Google recently?), single-sign-on, and moderation. These were all solved by Reddit and I believe lemmy solves them too. The fediverse [3] truly has the potential to liberate small internet communities from the vagaries of Big Social Media, of which Reddit is only the latest example.
[1] https://join-lemmy.org
[2] https://the-federation.info/platform/73
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse