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Lemmy, an open-source federated Reddit alternative, gets funding for development

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Re: Lemmy, an open-source federated Reddit alternative, gets funding for development

#61

Post by kiba »

detaro wrote: post #49
badRNG wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems to be the outcome of all of these Reddit clones, even the ones made with the best of intentions. Take for instance Ruqqus, another site created as a free speech reddit alternative. It consistently has horrifying content on the front page regularly; viciously racist content, anti-Semitic memes, unironic pro-Nazism/pro-genocide discussion posts, and generally terrible content. This is likely because it is ex…

Why do you assume that all alternatives have to be "free speech = allowing abuse" alternatives? E.g. a large subset of Fediverse (Mastodon etc) communities are communities that avoid Twitter because they don't feel Twitter is doing enough to be safe for them. And instances have a varying policies about how they handle instances with different moderation standards.

All good alternatives will have rule, thus moderation.

Where does the line between "free speech" and moderation exists?

Re: Lemmy, an open-source federated Reddit alternative, gets funding for development

#62

Post by ryeights »

FreeTrade wrote: post #29

member.cash is an interesting Reddit alternative. Not federated, but all the content is on a blockchain, so comments/users can't be censored, but users can filter them.

What happens when illegal content is posted? Is it stuck on the blockchain forever?

Re: Lemmy, an open-source federated Reddit alternative, gets funding for development

#63

Post by jchw »

MattGaiser wrote: post #18

How is this going to avoid becoming like Voat? Reddit already has competitors. It is just that they are cesspools as the only people who have a strong reason to leave reddit are those reddit has banned.

It’s true that “thing but not” sites tend to have issues with getting the unwanted population of the original “thing” website. And of course, some of that “unwanted” population is actually not necessarily bad, but a lot of it certainly is. I think the main way you can combat this is by disincentivizing users to bring their unwanted behaviors to the new site while incentivizing existing users to check it out. Obviously network effects dominate, but that hasn’t stopped there from being small niches where Mastodon instances and Matrix chats are good and healthy. OTOH, the point of sites like Voat and Gab were to support users who were not welcome on Reddit and Twitter, and therefore it quickly became a problem. But I don’t like the notion that you can’t directly compete with established sites - I feel like back in the day this is Exactly what happened with news aggregators. Digg and Reddit were once fairly similar sites; although Digg always had a nicer interface, they served an extremely similar purpose at the end of the day, and yet it was possible for them to compete. I think it’s harder now, but probably still doable if you can be novel enough, or if the big site becomes too annoying (Reddit seems to really be trying at this, to be honest; just try using their website on a mobile browser!)

Re: Lemmy, an open-source federated Reddit alternative, gets funding for development

#64

Post by holidaygoose »

MattGaiser wrote: post #18

How is this going to avoid becoming like Voat? Reddit already has competitors. It is just that they are cesspools as the only people who have a strong reason to leave reddit are those reddit has banned.

Can we try to figure out sociologically, why by default unmoderated social forums become far-right oriented?

Is it because:

- People on the far-right are magnitudes more vocal and active online than those on the left? That they spend a magnitude more time posting and voting on the internet?

- Or when people are anonymous, they reveal their "true selves" more which exhibits more far-right (selfish, tribal, conservative) values.

- Or we are underestimating how many people are on the far right, because they are constantly censored so in our minds we think they are the minority but maybe they're about half of the online population?

I'm just trying to figure out why it takes herculean effort to shift things enough to the left to be publicly palatable. And if so, then then it seems like any social forum is going to require heavy censorship/moderation to even be tolerable to the general public.

Re: Lemmy, an open-source federated Reddit alternative, gets funding for development

#66

Post by _8j50 »

rglullis wrote: post #54
_8j50 wrote: post #11

Sorry, don't like the name. Also, when you say a reddit alternative, to me it gives the impression that the redditor culture will remain so why would I sacrifice the content rich reddit for a new platform? Federation doesn't mean much to me as a user that justs wants [social]entertainment and news (and commentary on them). There's only one thing that can change my mind a little: if you guarantee email is not and will…

Is paying in crypto that much of a feature for you? Honestly curious about it. I have been working on hosted Mastodon/XMPP/Matrix and I would definitely consider adding Lemmy to my list of supported services. If I can get authentication via LDAP for it, even better and quicker. The one thing stopping me from a bigger announcement is that I am yet to finish my crypto payment integration. If you are indeed interesting…

I pay 3x the price for protonmail just so I can buy crypto at an inflated price with cash and pay for my email. Yes it is critical for me. I and many others are willing to pay up for a service that respects our privacy and asks for consent before selling us out.

Re: Lemmy, an open-source federated Reddit alternative, gets funding for development

#67

Post by badRNG »

detaro wrote: post #49
badRNG wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems to be the outcome of all of these Reddit clones, even the ones made with the best of intentions. Take for instance Ruqqus, another site created as a free speech reddit alternative. It consistently has horrifying content on the front page regularly; viciously racist content, anti-Semitic memes, unironic pro-Nazism/pro-genocide discussion posts, and generally terrible content. This is likely because it is ex…

Why do you assume that all alternatives have to be "free speech = allowing abuse" alternatives? E.g. a large subset of Fediverse (Mastodon etc) communities are communities that avoid Twitter because they don't feel Twitter is doing enough to be safe for them. And instances have a varying policies about how they handle instances with different moderation standards.

When free speech on the internet is discussed, it is within the context of freedom from excessive moderation on a platform. To call a Fediverse a "platform" doesn't seem quite analogous, these communities are more like their own platforms that are far more intensely moderated than even Twitter or Reddit.

Free speech advocates who aren't convinced by the "just go to another platform" argument in a discussion about Reddit or Twitter censorship likely won't think the argument is worth accepting simply by redefining what a platform is.

Re: Lemmy, an open-source federated Reddit alternative, gets funding for development

#68

Post by Miner49er »

badRNG wrote: post #43
hypersoar wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Voat was created intentionally and specifically for the (mostly far-right) trolls too unsavory for Reddit. So, if Lemmy is not that, it'll have a head start.

This seems to be the outcome of all of these Reddit clones, even the ones made with the best of intentions. Take for instance Ruqqus, another site created as a free speech reddit alternative. It consistently has horrifying content on the front page regularly; viciously racist content, anti-Semitic memes, unironic pro-Nazism/pro-genocide discussion posts, and generally terrible content. This is likely because it is ex…

raddle.me is a reddit alternative created by lefists after being banned on Reddit. It hasn't been taken over by the far right.

Re: Lemmy, an open-source federated Reddit alternative, gets funding for development

#69

Post by judge2020 »

_8j50 wrote: post #27
mahathu wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There's only one thing that can change my mind a little: if you guarantee email is not and will never be required to sign up or use a feature. I'm not trying to play the devils advocate here, just genuinely curious: Why do you (or anyone else) have such a strong opinion on not using emails for signing up? Usually, when a service requires me to enter an email, I have no issue with using a service like 10minutemail an…

I have spoken about this many times on HN. It comes down to this: email is being used in many nefarious ways and it is an ancient protocol with many insecurities. Anonymous email works for a bit but then every service worth using starts banning the providers. Both reddit and HN prospered as a result of not requiring email, that should tell you a lot about how horrible it is. It's on the same level as social security…

The problem is always 'how do i allow this user to reset their password', or more 'how do i verifiably contact the user'/'how do i verify someone emailing support is who they say they are' - without email, it's completely on the user to know and remember their password, something a lot of people can't do (and most don't use a p/w manager). HN does fine here since it's a 'tech' community where the majority likely does use a password manager, and Reddit gets away with it since their UI is so quiet about the email being optional - almost everyone thinks it's a required field since other websites require it and it looks just like the u/p field.

Re: Lemmy, an open-source federated Reddit alternative, gets funding for development

#70

Post by fastball »

raldi wrote: post #33
MattGaiser wrote: post #18

How is this going to avoid becoming like Voat? Reddit already has competitors. It is just that they are cesspools as the only people who have a strong reason to leave reddit are those reddit has banned.

The only redditlike sites that outcompete Reddit are ones with more moderation (e.g., HN), not less.

I would say it's not "more moderation" but rather "better moderation". An unbelievable amount of human effort is spent moderating reddit. It is very, very far from unmoderated. The issue is that the moderation going on is not intended to help along things like constructive conversation. Moderation on Reddit by and large exists to make subreddits as insular and myopic as possible.
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