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Reddit’s blackout protest is set to continue indefinitely

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Re: Reddit’s blackout protest is set to continue indefinitely

#421

Post by Applejinx »

candiddevmike wrote: post #227
TechBro8615 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lemmy has the same discoverability and usability problems as Mastodon. Especially for non-technical users, there's too much friction required to find their communities and aggregate them into a single usable feed with a nice client. And that's assuming they can even conceptualize what the fediverse is. I'm a technical user, and I closed join-lemmy.org after ten seconds because it was too many clicks to get to an inte…

Or folks could learn how to do this stuff. Centralization due to "ease of use" is what got us into this mess, and keeps getting us into more walled gardens. At some point folks need to take some responsibility and learn how to setup and maintain their own shit.

Centralization due to ease of use IS social media.

Without the centralization, why bother? Without the monolithic environments it's all private gardens. There's no point going and standing in someone's private garden while they're away.

It's seeking of the public square that is generating this situation, over and over and over again. This mess IS the territory. Either there's a way to have best of both worlds, or some kind of 'both worlds, in a compromised way', or this will always happen and this, too, is the territory: all public squares will be bombed for one reason or another until they're gone.

Re: Reddit’s blackout protest is set to continue indefinitely

#422

Post by redundantly »

nullityrofl wrote: post #387
chongli wrote: post #37

I was really skeptical of lemmy [1] when I first heard about it during the blackout. I joined yesterday and it completely changed my mind. Yes, it is going to face some growing pains (see the total user growth in the past few days) [2] in the coming weeks and months but it really has the potential to replace Reddit with a federated system of communities. One that won't be damaged by investors or executives attempting…

Federated services will never become mainstream. This is just the reality that people need to come to accept. I find them heavily talked about in circles with my colleagues and in my profession but the attraction of decentralized services just isn't there for the vast majority of people. I find Lemmy frustrating to use and it isn't just growing pains: it's the same reason I find Mastodon frustrating. Do I care if use…

> Federated services will never become mainstream

That's kind of the point

Mastadon, Lemmy, Etc, they're not replacements for Reddit or Facebook. They're an alternative.

A social network doesn't require millions of users to be useful. It's okay that they're not for everyone.

> Centralization works. It's convenient. It doesn't require a user guide. It's approachable for laypersons.

For a technically inclined person on a largely technology focused forum, you sound an awful lot like a luddite.

There used to be a high barrier to entry for accessing the internet and making use of it. That changed over time. The same will likely happen for these types of non-centralised services.

Re: Reddit’s blackout protest is set to continue indefinitely

#423

Post by jtode »

_8j50 wrote: post #205
chongli wrote: post #37

I was really skeptical of lemmy [1] when I first heard about it during the blackout. I joined yesterday and it completely changed my mind. Yes, it is going to face some growing pains (see the total user growth in the past few days) [2] in the coming weeks and months but it really has the potential to replace Reddit with a federated system of communities. One that won't be damaged by investors or executives attempting…

Lemmy is a good idea with a terrible name and a misunderstanding of the experience users look for, much like mastodon. For example, I will never join any of these services but I will browse r/All, many lurkers drive traffic and reddit would be almost nothing without r/All which I can't figure out if lemmy has.

C'mon, you just wanted to name your thing after Lemmy and they beat you to it.

Re: Reddit’s blackout protest is set to continue indefinitely

#424

Post by Animats »

TechBro8615 wrote: post #169
chongli wrote: post #37

I was really skeptical of lemmy [1] when I first heard about it during the blackout. I joined yesterday and it completely changed my mind. Yes, it is going to face some growing pains (see the total user growth in the past few days) [2] in the coming weeks and months but it really has the potential to replace Reddit with a federated system of communities. One that won't be damaged by investors or executives attempting…

Lemmy has the same discoverability and usability problems as Mastodon. Especially for non-technical users, there's too much friction required to find their communities and aggregate them into a single usable feed with a nice client. And that's assuming they can even conceptualize what the fediverse is. I'm a technical user, and I closed join-lemmy.org after ten seconds because it was too many clicks to get to an inte…

The front page of lemmy:

Lemmy - A link aggregator for the fediverse.

Join a Server - Run a Server - Follow communities anywhere in the world

Lemmy is a selfhosted social link aggregation and discussion platform.

No, no. You lead with the benefits to the user. This isn't Github.

It suffers from the same problem as Mastodon - "Join a server". But which one?

These federated things need to be set up so that there's "no wrong door". Enter anywhere, see the same stuff regardless of where it's hosted. Discovery and hosting may be distributed behind the scenes, but they have to have a unified user entry point.

USENET had that problem solved. It was federated, but it didn't look federated to the end user.

Re: Reddit’s blackout protest is set to continue indefinitely

#425

Post by cdelsolar »

beowulfey wrote: post #187
TechBro8615 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lemmy has the same discoverability and usability problems as Mastodon. Especially for non-technical users, there's too much friction required to find their communities and aggregate them into a single usable feed with a nice client. And that's assuming they can even conceptualize what the fediverse is. I'm a technical user, and I closed join-lemmy.org after ten seconds because it was too many clicks to get to an inte…

Try Lemmy.world. Currently the fastest growing Lemmy server. It feels basically like any other social media site, like Hacker News or Reddit. I was using it, and seeing people post from other servers was pretty seamless and felt intuitive. Honestly, I say this all the time but I think people just need to treat federation like it's email. The difference is that the "email threads" are public to all, rather than in you…

I’m a technical person and I still don’t understand what federation is. I also read somewhere to treat it like email. What is like email? To who? I don’t understand how all the servers are interlinked and what it means to post from one server to another. Do I have identities on all the servers?

Re: Reddit’s blackout protest is set to continue indefinitely

#426

Post by comte7092 »

Loughla wrote: post #403
comte7092 wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s kind of part of the model. Governance is up to individual instances/communities rather than one faceless megacorp. It’s a feature not a bug.

Yes, and what I don't think you're hearing is that Joe Blow consumer doesn't care who is in charge of governance. They care that it's easy to use.

Moderation on platforms has been a major topic of debate for years now. Joe blow absolutely cares what gets removed.

Re: Reddit’s blackout protest is set to continue indefinitely

#427

Post by traverseda »

wvenable wrote: post #356
traverseda wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm the head mod of a pretty big subreddit, /r/3Dprinting, with 7 million views a month and 1.8 million subscribers. At the beginning of this I set up a lemmy instance at https://rhombik.com and linked to it from that subreddit. From the roughly 150k uniques per day we had on /r/3Dprinting zero of them have tried the lemmy instance. So make of that what you will.

Perhaps setting up your own instance for a single community is the wrong approach. You're basically hosting an entire Reddit for a single subreddit. It probably hurts discoverability a bit. There are already 3D printing communities on Lemmy. https://lemmy.ca/c/3dprinting@lemmy.ml

Lemmy.ml wasn't accepting new users at the time. This server has 200GB of ram, plenty of space. I do also try to connect people to lemmy in general but it's challenging when the "main instance" isn't accepting new users.

Re: Reddit’s blackout protest is set to continue indefinitely

#428

Post by bamfly »

nullityrofl wrote: post #400
bamfly wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Works for email. There are only a few big hosts and some larger-but-not-huge number of mid-sized ones, sure, but they all play nicely with one another. Like if you could post on Twitter from your Facebook account. Of course, I doubt we could create email today, if it didn't already exist.

Email works because despite it's decentralized nature, it's functionally transparent to the user and you aren't constantly forced to acknowledge that nature. The issue with "Fediverse" technologies is not dissimilar from crypto: it's designers care more about the ideology and the concept of being in the fediverse than they do meeting an actual product need. In spite of a _dire_ gap in the market place and a substanti…

> Email works because despite it's decentralized nature, it's functionally transparent to the user and you aren't constantly forced to acknowledge that nature.

You are forced to, every time you have to write the bit after the @ in an email address, though!

> The issue with "Fediverse" technologies is not dissimilar from crypto: it's designers care more about the ideology and the concept of being in the fediverse than they do meeting an actual product need.

I think the trouble is that they're still trying to be too centralized(!) and keep too much control over content on the side of the various federated servers. Email defers to the client far more than these systems do. Gmail's not going to cut off "federation" with @microsoft.com because some of its users are sending solicited racist newsletters and MS refuses to ban them, for instance (if they become a spam farm and a huge proportion of Gmail's users complain about it? Yeah, then, maybe). Fastmail probably won't ban you because you're receiving racist newsletters. There aren't content moderators, just mostly-automated responses to user reports of abuse. The user is in control, and the servers don't try to proactively police or curate content that users want to read (they filter spam, sure).

(I mean, there's the further problem that it's nearly impossible to create a new open protocol of any kind and get any notable adoption these days, but that's not the fault of the federated model)

[EDIT] To be clear, I'm not advocating for racist newsletters in the above, that was just an unambiguous example of the kind of thing that'll draw swift and harsh moderator action on a lot of federated servers but that can (I assume—admittedly, I've not tried) get passed around via email without problems—my point is that the issues with "drama" and network-churn and such in federated networks, that may disrupt the usage patterns of ordinary users, is connected to how much control the server operators have. More fundamentally, this is connected to making the activity of these communities public on the Web by default—which I think is largely a mistake, I think it's really weird that it's become common for groups of people chatting about whatever to put everything they say on billboards in flashing lights all around the world.

Re: Reddit’s blackout protest is set to continue indefinitely

#429

Post by jacooper »

willmeyers wrote: post #206
baby wrote: post #35

I said it before, and I’ll say it again. This is a huge opportunity for Facebook. They sort of tried to do Reddit in the past and ended up with shitty Facebook groups. If I were them, I would rush to add some reddit features to Facebook group (reddit-like threads, upvotes/downvotes) or try to launch something new that’s more like reddit on top of the facebook/insta social graph. Just call it “Groups”

Meta's already launched channels for Whatsapp and planning on doing a similar rollout for Insta. Definitely going to shake things up https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/15/instagram-is-rolling-out-i...

Channels are more of a telegram thing though

Re: Reddit’s blackout protest is set to continue indefinitely

#430

Post by roastedoolong »

cpncrunch wrote: post #374
brainfish wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment contains one of the most-repeated pieces of misinformation from the whole blackout: moderation tools. Reddit has stated repeatedly that moderation tools will be exempted from the API changes. "We will ensure existing utilities, especially moderation tools, have free access to our API."[1] [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/141oqn8/api_update...

Unfortunately it seems that most of the reddit users/subs participating in this "strike" aren't interested in the facts. I see /r/science says it is private due to accessibility changes and it links to a Verge article, but the Verge article actually says that accessibility apps are exempted.

the whole point is Reddit says that accessibility apps are exempt except in those cases where the app that offers accessibility does, you know, other things that people want their apps to do.
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