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Guide to Finding Lemmy Communities (Subreddits)

tech.michaelaltfield.net

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Re: Guide to Finding Lemmy Communities (Subreddits)

#31

Post by jug »

unpopularopp wrote: post #5

>Don't overthink this. It doesn't matter which instance you use. Nah. Disagree and I don't even know why is this highlighted. It really does matter what you choose. Same with Mastodon. Each instance has an admin who can do whatever they want (eg delete the instance and permaban you) and on top of that each topic has a mod too. Plus your instance can be de-federated by others (what if your instance end up being a far…

Yes, I was hit by this downside as I signed up for Mastodon.se, a big and seemingly "safe" (as in not to be suddenly shut down) general interest Mastodon instance used by tens of thousands. Well, and so it happened that some other instances began defederating it because it allowed members of any political party to join it, not blocking far right users. The admin didn't have resources or interest for such a kind of political moderation despite where no freedom of speech was being violated to boot. As he just ran the instance as a hobby project, he had to shut down because he lost interest when his instance was drawn into negative light.

So BOOM and tens of thousands Mastodon users had to migrate instance. The problem now was that you try to learn from past mistakes but realize that many other large instances aren't that transparent about funding models and how willing they are to work with these issues. You have alternatives but most others are also just "some guys who run this instance and provide a server for a community".

I don't think I really bounced back to Mastodon since then even if I did migrate. But it didn't feel the same when we were on this shaky ground.

Re: Guide to Finding Lemmy Communities (Subreddits)

#34

Post by lolinder »

newaccount74 wrote: post #28
lolinder wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the ActivityPub protocol is pretty inefficient when you have lots of small instances This seems like a pretty fundamental design flaw. It means that redundancy is there—you can always find another instance if you're made homeless—but self-sovereignty was not prioritized in the design. The kind of person who's attracted to the idea of federation is going to be disproportionately likely to want to self-host, so the s…

> The kind of person who's attracted to the idea of federation is going to be disproportionately likely to want to self-host That's not my experience on Mastodon. Most people seem to be on shared instances. Very few people self host. It's mostly tech affine organisations who self host.

I didn't say most people would want to self-host, I said they would be disproportionately likely to want to.

To make up some numbers: if 0.001% of the general population wants to self-host, maybe 0.1% of fediverse users would if it were easier. Even with tiny percentages, there are still a lot of small instances and the protocol should have been designed for that.

Re: Guide to Finding Lemmy Communities (Subreddits)

#35

Post by creamyhorror »

bioemerl wrote: post #8

Please use kbin instead - It's not run by literal Chinese state apologists.

kbin's in PHP/Symfony - I wonder how its instances will handle scaling, considering even (Rust-based) Lemmy instances are facing issues with the not-even-that-massive influx of visitors. Also, I like kbin's design better, but calling topics/subforums "Magazines" is a bit strange.

Wish there were one or two more good options in other languages. I know about Calckay/Misskey but they seem more microblog-like and not organised by topic at the top level.

Being able to port identity and posts/content between ActivityPub servers also seems like an issue, but I don't know if any major project has already solved that.

Re: Guide to Finding Lemmy Communities (Subreddits)

#36

Post by Kye »

Semaphor wrote: post #23
Kye wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The neat thing about federated social media is you don't have to federate with tankies even if you use their software. kbin appears to have some trouble working with Mastodon. My experience so far is boosts and replies on Mastodon are the #1 driver of new signups to the Lemmy instance I'm on, so it matters.

Kbin works better with mastodon, but the software is also newer, and the main instance is run by the single dev. They are currently behind cloudflare which disturbs federation.

I'm basing that on this: https://pawb.social/comment/20112

Which seems to be more a fundamental implementation issue than a CDN issue. I don't think they're talking about the main instance.

Re: Guide to Finding Lemmy Communities (Subreddits)

#37

Post by aSockPuppeteer »

davewritescode wrote: post #20
icapybara wrote: post #16

I think we all want a viable Reddit alternative (and Twitter alternative), but the “fediverse” isn’t it. Why? 1. New user experience is very confusing. You have to learn a bunch of dorky sounding terminology right away (instance, fediverse/federated, etc), and there are a whole bunch of instances to choose from, but none of them may be particularly appealing or relevant to you specifically. 2. At least on Lemmy, I’m…

> New user experience is very confusing. You have to learn a bunch of dorky sounding terminology right away (instance, fediverse/federated, etc), and there are a whole bunch of instances to choose from, but none of them may be particularly appealing or relevant to you specifically. For technical discussions, this is a feature not a bug. Having a small technical hurdle to get over before contributing is a filter when…

Agree. It’s a nice barrier to entry . Like the fee to shop at bulk stores, expensive grocers, or professional certifications.

I’m getting distracted less without Reddit and two notifications per day at a chosen time from email/slack/etc.

Re: Guide to Finding Lemmy Communities (Subreddits)

#38

Post by newaccount74 »

icapybara wrote: post #16

I think we all want a viable Reddit alternative (and Twitter alternative), but the “fediverse” isn’t it. Why? 1. New user experience is very confusing. You have to learn a bunch of dorky sounding terminology right away (instance, fediverse/federated, etc), and there are a whole bunch of instances to choose from, but none of them may be particularly appealing or relevant to you specifically. 2. At least on Lemmy, I’m…

Regarding 1.: In my memory, Reddit was just as confusing to newcomers, with all their terminology. What are these words people keep mentioning here? sub, GP, OP, flair, gold, sidebar, ...

Twitter also took me ages to understand what RT and HT and via was supposed to mean and what the difference was between retweets and replies and stars (that are now likes?)...

Re: Guide to Finding Lemmy Communities (Subreddits)

#39

Post by whoopdedo »

lolinder wrote: post #9
htag wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of the same arguments can be made for SMTP, and hosting your own server there.

The difference is that email is private. The contents of your email are not seen as being endorsed by Google just because you have an @gmail.com address, so Google doesn't have an incentive to ban you just because they find your politics odious. In the fediverse calls to defederate happen pretty regularly, and the reasoning is sound—your instance will be publicly mirroring any content on a federated instance, so if y…

Banning in the email world means having your messages dumped into a junk folder. Or worse having your IP address in a reject list so its impossible to operate a private server.

Re: Guide to Finding Lemmy Communities (Subreddits)

#40

Post by scarecrw »

csallen wrote: post #25
davewritescode wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> New user experience is very confusing. You have to learn a bunch of dorky sounding terminology right away (instance, fediverse/federated, etc), and there are a whole bunch of instances to choose from, but none of them may be particularly appealing or relevant to you specifically. For technical discussions, this is a feature not a bug. Having a small technical hurdle to get over before contributing is a filter when…

Reddit is a massive social website. The vast majority of the value of Reddit comes from the fact that it's humongous. A niche community that tries to filter out most people isn't a Reddit replacement.

I think some people are talking past each other when referring to a "reddit replacement" by focusing on different aspects and even different eras of reddit.

Speaking for myself, I would love to see some of the features reddit popularized be brought to a replacement. However, I'm not at all interested in a one-to-one replacement of reddit in its current form, especially if we take "current form" to mean what a typical user would experience joining the site today.

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