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

dev.lemmy.ml

201–210 of 678 posts

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

#201

> JavaScript is required for this page. Yeah, I'm out. That was a problem with the federated reddit-alike notabug.io too. It was just one giant javascript application, not html. And doing "pre-rendering" of the javascript on the host machine made the VPS costs too much to be tenable for people to federate.

Prerendering of the JavaScript? What do mean by that? Don't you mean prerendering HTML?

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

#202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

Yes, and that works fine because there's no platform there, just a 1 on 1 or small group conversation. You can still easily replicate this, unmoderated, with email or various messaging apps.

Once you can talk to potentially hundreds or thousands of people at once, once there's a platform, that model breaks down. Bad actors who would be uninterested in trolling single individuals are very interested in trolling hundreds at a time. And nobody wants to "walk away" from an otherwise good community because of handful of very loud people are spouting hate there.

Any platform that's both popular and unmoderated will eventually be dominated by extreme content, and will push out normal people, who will go somewhere that's popular and moderated.

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

#203
post #42

Seems to be crashing on my end.

Same here. Must be getting the HN hug of death.

> dessalines (mod, admin, creator) 23 minutes ago

> We have > 2200 connections to the server right now, its a DDOS. Rust seems to be handling it fine, but the nginx is having issues.

https://dev.lemmy.ml/post/35712

Sounds about right - I'm amused that whoever saw this thought it was a ddos though.

dessalines - if you're reading this - I expect looking at referrers would be a good way to (manually) diagnose real attacks vs people becoming interested in your site.

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

#204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I’m hopeful. The Distributed Web movement appears to have legs and momentum. Time will tell if it delivers the aspirational value supporters believe in.

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

#205
post #76

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 a weird issue honestly. I've been on reddit for almost a decade, and I don't like what it has become. I would love to switch to a better alternative, but the problem is any alternative that pops up seems to be filled with extremists as soon as it starts. This doesn't imply that anyone who wants to leave reddit is a neo-nazi, a lot of us are stuck with reddit because everything else is filled with shit.

What are you thoughts on tildes? In my experience the community there is reasonable and definitely not filled with nazis.

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

#207

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, conservativ…

Option 4: poorly moderated forums tend to fill with people banned by most other forums, such as Nazis. And various other undesirables, too; I gather voat had a big influx when Reddit banned its paedophile subreddits, and another one when FPH et all were killed.

So if 1% of the population are far-right extremists, but most normal platforms ban or restrict them, any new platform with poor regulation will tend to fill with them.

I do think that the very extreme (and thus bannable) far right _are_ probably more common than ditto on the far left; you just don't get that many Stalinists, anywhere. But the normal left (and normal right) aren't generally nasty enough to get banned everywhere, so most of the internet's displaced population of commenters is far right.

I think there is an aspect of option 1, too, though. In Ireland a while back we had a referendum on allowing same-sex marriage, which passed by 62%, and another one, on legalising abortion (until then only legal in very limited circumstances), a few years later, which passed by 66%. Now, if you'd gone based on web polls and opinions being expressed in the comments on mainstream sites, you'd have assumed that both would fail by a landslide; it was really kind of incredible. Comments on news sites etc were grossly unrepresentative of the actual public mood; the right really does seem to be a lot noisier.

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

#208
post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that there's an equivalency between the advocacy for the genocide of black people, Jews, trans people, etc and opposing someone for their political beliefs. Perhaps there'd be more legitimacy in a comparison to the vitriol on the left against billionaires and cops, but these are positions of power, not identity groups one is born into. All revolutionaries of all political persuasions will oppose those i…

[flagged]

I love how you explicitly avoided the use of the word gender and don't actually address that you're uncomfortable that some people don't fit into the social boxes of male and female.

As for vitriol against billionaires and cops, taking a stand against people abusing power is as American as the Boston tea party. If you're advocating for people to shut up and take the abuse you sound pretty authoritarian to me. Is it that hard to look at the situation and say "give me liberty or give me death" applies to poor people and black people too?

I'll let James Baldwin do the talking:

https://youtu.be/c3n-cI4wXCM?t=34

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

#209
post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that there's an equivalency between the advocacy for the genocide of black people, Jews, trans people, etc and opposing someone for their political beliefs. Perhaps there'd be more legitimacy in a comparison to the vitriol on the left against billionaires and cops, but these are positions of power, not identity groups one is born into. All revolutionaries of all political persuasions will oppose those i…

[flagged]

> This is a misdirection. Yes there are a very small minority of people who do call for this but it is what I'm talk about is simple opposition to others political beliefs. If I say that there are only two sexes and you cannot change your sex, I would be banned from many of the most popular subreddits. This is not advocating for the genocide of trans people. It's a scientific and political position.

A comparison can be made to other positions which may be a tad extreme here, but I think it's arguably appropriate. If someone advocated for climate change denialism on any public forum, they'd be laughed out of the metaphorical room. However, even if attempts are made to persuade said people with logical arguments, often they will continue to hold such beliefs to the same strength or even stronger than before.

Is it appropriate to silence people for holding specific views? No. But ultimately some compromise has to be made. A decent solution may be the use of a debate section, but I'm sure better ones exist.

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

#210

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…

Actually, we have recently improved on this, it’s probably now less than half an hour of setup, at least on Linux. The new guide is on the Github repo: https://gist.github.com/nehbit/4a8c3d81d543e85c9df974f521732...

We use Electron exclusively for GUI. The real app is a Go binary with a GRPC API. It’s all fully isolated, so if you don’t want to touch any Electron, you don’t have to. Use the API to build a CLI app, for example.

To be more specific, we have two Go binaries that we ship, one is the aether-backend that talks to the network, the other is the aether-frontend that compiles the content coming from the network into a social graph. Both are properly isolated and talk to each other only over declared GRPC APIs. I’ve tried very hard to keep it hackable that way.

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