Lemmy, an open-source federated Reddit alternative, gets funding for development • Hacker News Board

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

#191

Post by antepodius » Sat, Jun 27, 2020, 10:06 PM UTC

toomuchtodo wrote: post #182

antepodius wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I mean it's about removing people you hate's ability to speak to each other (and to you) in a completely legal manner, by getting reddit to destroy the place where they congregate and hounding them out of the digital cities. The answer, of course, is that these people should build their own cities. But first, of course, they'll just have to build their own websites, servers, datacentres, ISPs, and nations. (And m…

> The answer, of course, is that these people should build their own cities. But first, of course, they'll just have to build their own websites, servers, datacentres, ISPs, and nations. Yeah! I’m proposing building systems on top of Reddit and Hacker News (just two examples, any forum really that serves its data as http) to backfill their content and discussion data (comments), and prevent global censorship by mod a…

Good luck! We do need something more robust than individual company-owned websites. My optimistic side hopes that when we get good enough protocols for this sort of thing entrenched, things will stay good.

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

#192

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jun 27, 2020, 10:07 PM UTC

readnews1 wrote: post #26

generatorguy wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might be on to something! repackage an nntp server with a web front end in a docker container and away you go

@zzo38computer (can you tag people on this website????)

[deleted]

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

#193

Post by needAnAltHN » Sat, Jun 27, 2020, 10:08 PM UTC

moomin wrote: post #175

CM30 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best way to stop an alternative becoming filled with extremists is to start it off as a community for a specific audience, then expand to a more general one later on. Twitch and Discord did well there for instance. Started out as gaming focused, then became more mainstream. By doing this, you bring in non extremists early on, and tilt the audience pecentages in such a way that most regulars aren't such extremists…

This is a seriously good observation. To add to it: moderation is _the_ hard problem of discussion forums. A nine year old can write a discussion board in python, any five decent developers can write one that scales reasonably. Or, you know, copy an open source codebase. Way harder is getting any actual users, but even that’s nothing compared to community maintenance. Saying you have no moderation is attractive to on…

Moderation is extremely difficult. I can't say HN is done well because there is a heavy subjective hand.

The only thing good are the vast majority of users here have good intention. If only HN had multiple boards with various mods.

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

#194

Post by chinesempire » Sat, Jun 27, 2020, 10:09 PM UTC

TulliusCicero wrote: post #167

asjw wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Moderation hides content That's the biggest limit of moderated forums, they only reflect the opinion of the most active groups who can steer the discussion helped by moderators who benefit from rewarding the largest groups instead of the best comments If moderation was visible and moderators were forced to leave a note about why the moderation took place it would be a real discussion platform HN is not Slashdot is a…

That's just the nature of discussion basically anywhere. Every person and group have lines that you're not allowed to cross, and when people cross them you just get unproductive blow-ups, and someone or some sub-group will leave. If you tried to herd state socialists/tankies and anarcho-capitalists/voluntarists into the same discussion space, they're so violently opposed they'd just be constantly screaming epithets a…

That's the nature of discussion when there is someone who controls the discussion.

If I'm having a discussion with people in real life I decide what I accept or not, there's no third party that decides for me what is right.

Decentralisation is exactly about that: it empowers you and not someone else to decide what you like to read or not.

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

#195

Post by ianleeclark » Sat, Jun 27, 2020, 10:10 PM UTC

throwvid19 wrote: post #169

TulliusCicero wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Normal people won't tolerate being on the same forum with huge assholes. Especially assholes who are bigoted, rather than just generally angry/jerk-ish. The far right happens to contain a lot of this kind of person. The far left has people who are also very angry, but they're generally not as bigoted. The demographic they're most angry at is rich people, which is punching up instead of down at least. And most of the…

[flagged]

One of the funniest parts of this is that a common critique by liberals in the US against the modern left is that the left is largely too CIS, white, and male.

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

#196

Post by rglullis » Sat, Jun 27, 2020, 10:11 PM UTC

rolleiflex wrote: post #151

We have something similar to this, Aether. https://getaether.net . (code at github.com/nehbit/aether) Always glad to see more eyeballs on the space, so I wish then the best. Here are a few differences I can see at the first glance: - Aether is decentralised (as in torrent) this appears to be federated. That means Aether truly has no servers and every user is a peer, while federated means there are smaller ‘Reddits’ a…

> By another proxy, this means Aether avoids the issue of having a ‘middle management’ (...) so no one can control what you see.

This right here is the main thing that will never let any fully-decentralized system become mainstream. Two problems:

- Most people do want "middle-management". They don't want to deal with security risks, technical issues, understanding how the protocol works just to be able to share memes and score points with their social peers. All they want is to open their browser, see what their friends/peers are posting and be done with it.

- This trade-off between federated systems/giving up control does not exist. A federated system can degenerate into a fully-distributed graph. Those that want to keep full control over their system can easily do with a federated system: they just run their own instances.

Decentralized systems for social networks fail the Zawinski test and do not provide one single use-case that can not be done with a federated alternative. I fail to see any benefit of pushing it except for buzzword investors.

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

#197

Post by LockAndLol » Sat, Jun 27, 2020, 10:11 PM UTC

rolleiflex wrote: post #151

We have something similar to this, Aether. https://getaether.net . (code at github.com/nehbit/aether) Always glad to see more eyeballs on the space, so I wish then the best. Here are a few differences I can see at the first glance: - Aether is decentralised (as in torrent) this appears to be federated. That means Aether truly has no servers and every user is a peer, while federated means there are smaller ‘Reddits’ a…

> Aether is a relatively large app with an Electron and Go toolchain, at 100,000+ lines of code. Getting it to compile requires setting up a correct build runtime with the latest versions of Go, Node (for Electron) and C dependencies and development environments. Expect the initial set-up to take a few hours. Be patient!

Is Electron a hard dependency or is there a core lib that can be wrapped by the GUI framework of choice? And several hours of initial setup is pretty scary . Maybe providing a dev docker, snap or flatpak could get devs up and running much faster than that.

Other than that, I love the idea of a decentralized forum. If there are specs I'll have a look at them to see how the intricacies of operating something like is were solved.

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

#198

Post by paulv » Sat, Jun 27, 2020, 10:12 PM UTC

throwvid19 wrote: post #180

paulv wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The far-right, on the other hand, I think is a lot more tolerant of at least the notion that "other" speech exists. They'll insult you, make fun, etc., but the compulsion to censor others is far less frequent. The right thinks explicit "censorship", which happens via the community or site owner, is bad. Implicit "censorship", however, which happens when the targets of racism/sexism/homophobia/transphobia[0] leave t…

Well put. The Left typically wants to silence/ignore while the Right typically wants to fight/berate about it.

Berating people to the point that they leave the discussion is the same thing as silencing.

Also, "berating" is a kind word. We're talking about "I have the right to exist" vs "we should systematically exterminate/enslave people like you"

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

#199

Post by shahsyed » Sat, Jun 27, 2020, 10:12 PM UTC

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.

That's a pretty general statement, one that I would avoid without proof or evidence.

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

#200

Post by heavyset_go » Sat, Jun 27, 2020, 10:13 PM UTC

throwvid19 wrote: post #138

holidaygoose wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, conservativ…

Most social sites lean left, and far-left dialog is generally tolerated in those places, while anything right of center is demonized in a gradient of intensity the further right you go. Your own scenarios exhibit this, for example: - You ask if the far-right are magnitudes more vocal, ignoring the comparison to the extremely vocal far-left which is heard regularly on mainstream social media - You conflate "conservati…

Weird, r/anarchocapitalism will ban anyone who is on the left, and r/conservative will ban conservatives who speak out against Trump. Even r/TheMotte will ban people for things like tone. I've yet to find these mythical spaces where conservatives tolerate speech they in particular don't like.