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

dev.lemmy.ml

271–280 of 678 posts

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

#271

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…

Sounds like there's some really interesting ideas here.

> Two people with two different mod lists for the same community can see drastically different communities

Reminds me of the 'sharding' idea in World of Warcraft. I'm really curious if you'll end up with issues of 'social dissonance' where your perception of a community differs drastically from someone else's because you literally see different content, and if that affects how people engage with the community.

Also, it seems like with user sovereignty and decentralization, that there will be various objectionable or even vile communities is inevitable, right? Is there a plan for how to deal with that, should Aether ever become popular enough to get more mainstream news attention? I imagine responding to tech blogs with, "yes, there are white supremacist sub-communities, but you don't have to see them if you don't want to" won't come across as a very satisfying answer from their perspective.

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

#272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't mind trolls, if I can decide who they are and silence them. This only works for small communities. You can't feasibly block the literally thousands of trolls and petty assholes that are posting on Reddit every day without that task consuming all your time. Multiply that by every single user having to do it personally and it gets even sillier. There's a reason basically every popular platform is moderated on…

> This only works for small communitie That's simply not true Ad blocking works because I decide what to block, not because the websites posting the ads are moderating them in a good way Let me decide, is it really that scary? My email account is not on Gmail, I manage the spam, and it's ridiculously easy to get just the content I want and delete everything else It's hard to scale it for hundreds of accounts automati…

This other comment in the thread sounds like it's what you're looking for, if you haven't heard of it - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23664901

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

#274

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…

I think it is because far-right is far less palatable than far-left. Consider two possible statements: 1. Hitler wasn't that bad. 2. Stalin wasn't that bad. I think, for most people, the first provokes a much more extreme reaction. Both were objectively terrible human beings, but defending Hitler is seen as far more extreme than defending Stalin. This has two effects: Firstly, far-right people are continually kicked…

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

#276
This has ActivityPub (AP) support on its roadmap. I wrote a well-received[0] argument that AP could be the future: https://kyefox.com/2020/04/09/activitypub-could-be-the-futur...

I softened on it a little over the years since, but I think that was just the dearth of new things coming out that ran on it. Now I'm starting to think that was just a reflection of the fact that the obvious, low-hanging fruit was handled (write.as/Pixelfed/PeerTube/Mastodon) and the next round will take a while as people who got on later get ideas and develop them into something like, for example, Lemmy.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22864029

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

#277

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…

I think it is because far-right is far less palatable than far-left. Consider two possible statements: 1. Hitler wasn't that bad. 2. Stalin wasn't that bad. I think, for most people, the first provokes a much more extreme reaction. Both were objectively terrible human beings, but defending Hitler is seen as far more extreme than defending Stalin. This has two effects: Firstly, far-right people are continually kicked…

[deleted]

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

#278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Care to explain the Zawinski test? Google gave me zip on it.

zawinski's law? Though not seeing how it is relevant to their point though.

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

#280
post #60

One thing that stands out to me is lemmy has public modlogs[1], this is a great feature in my opinion. Something that should be more common. Quite a few people on reddit are frustrated by how opaque moderation is, but looking at the meta community of power users that seems to mod the bigger subs, I doubt the devs will ever copy this feature. [1]: https://dev.lemmy.ml/modlog

FYI you can review reddit mod actions via https://www.reveddit.com

Disclaimer: I made this

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