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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

#451

Post by JumpCrisscross »

sudosysgen wrote: post #433
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> pick a large, popular instance and be done with it .world is having technical issues. (I could sign up. But first login spawns an infinite spinny. The only reason I know that's one of the larger servers is because of this thread.) I'm doing it. But it's tedious, and the hacker in me sees an opening for a competitor to scoop out the 90% of users who don't care about federation, they just want it to work. > you don't…

The problem is that there's no reason it won't end the same as Reddit if you don't have federation, so you actually can't scoop out 90% of users because they might as well stay on Reddit.

> there's no reason it won't end the same as Reddit if you don't have federation, so you actually can't scoop out 90% of users because they might as well stay on Reddit

It will end up like Reddit. But right now it isn't, and that's good enough to make a play for the users. Given a choice between that and choosing a server, signing up, finding its log-in unresponsive, looking for another server, signing up... (I haven't gotten further than this) who do you think wins?

By the way, we agree. I want a federated system to work. But simple sign-up fuck-ups, where even someone who's curious for curiosity's sake has to spend half an hour figuring out which servers even work at the moment,

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

#452

Post by larperdoodle »

blendergeek wrote: post #109
rblatz wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also most people don’t really care about the API/3rd party app thing. It doesn’t impact them and it looks from the outside like a bunch of dorks with no lives getting worked up over nothing. I’ve been on Reddit since the digg migration and I’ve never felt the need for an app, old.reddit.com and Adblock works perfectly fine on the phone. Better than Reddit’s mobile site.

> old.reddit.com and Adblock works perfectly fine on the phone. Better than Reddit’s mobile site. What if I told you that Reddit is going to do away with 'old.reddit.com' next?

[flagged]

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

#453

Post by kristopolous »

Animats wrote: post #424
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…

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…

Isn't this the same problem IRC had but IRC was (still is?) fairly widely used? (Wikipedia says its peak was about 10mil in 2004/2005 - which makes it 1% according to here: https://www.internetworldstats.com/emarketing.htm)

Regardless, if I was able to capture 1% of the net, that's not a failure by any stretch.

How did IRC succeed here? Have any hard evidence as opposed to intuition or speculation?

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

#454

Post by bamfly »

goatlover wrote: post #434
bamfly wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe I'm in a reverse sub-bubble, but outside of the tech circles complaining, the protest still seems to be "what protest?" My wife noticed day-1 of the protests (I know because she asked me for the TL;DR of WTF is happening) and she doesn't move in tech circles, and the subs she likes (liked?) are all pop-culture stuff. Pretty sure she's just not been using reddit since then, as all of what she cared about is go…

You realize this is anecdotal and not statistical evidence of the larger population of Reddit users, right? What percentage are like your friends, versus how many continue to use Reddit, or will go right back when things return to normal, one way or another?

> You realize this is anecdotal and not statistical evidence of the larger population of Reddit users, right?

I mean, yeah, I thought I made that clear in my post. I see words to that effect, certainly.

And I was responding to your anecdote. So. Did you ask yourself these questions before posting, or was that different somehow?

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

#455

Post by jtode »

codetrotter wrote: post #62
idiotsecant wrote: post #12

It seems to me like this is turning into a subreddit migration in slow motion. A lot people still want to post content and a lot of people still want to read content, so what's happening is people are posting it to the less popular 'alternative' versions of the popular subreddits and those posts make the frontpage instead. It seems like there is a noticeable decline in quality but i'm still seeing quite a bit of post…

> a viable, popular alternative Popular? No. Viable? Yes. Try https://zapad.nstr.no/ it’s my instance. If even a handful of people would join I think that would be nice.

Since you've got insight into operating, can you clarify for me: Does federation happen at the community level?

So for instance, using reddit terminology, if I subscribe to r/gardening on your instance, do I get the same thing as everyone else gets in r/gardening on all the instances you federate with?

I'm clear on federation in general but not how it works for link aggregation. I've been reddit-free for about a year now but I've been planning to check out Lemmy once the current wave dies down and I'm not contributing to load stress.

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

#456

Post by goatlover »

vineyardmike wrote: post #224
thunderbird120 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are starting to come to terms with the new reality where tech companies actually need to have a viable business model which takes in more money than it expends. The return of nonzero interest rates means that the runway is no longer infinite, you can't just raise more money to cover costs forever, eventually you have to either take off or crash. This is revealing just how much of a nonsensical anomaly most of…

> …and that is the way it should be. I don’t know, it’s looking like most people prefer businesses that eschew profits. Yea my business-101 textbook says businesses should run a profit, but my sociology-101 textbook says we should do things that are good for people. Maybe Reddit (et al) should be recreated as non profits dedicated to community building… before Facebook becomes the sole source of internet social inter…

How will non-profit Reddit pay its costs? What makes you think doing things for the good of people is excluded by for profit businesses? They create all sorts of products and services that people want and need. Yes, there are abuses. Same with non profits. Because humans are in charge.

The problem with doing things for the good of people in a general sense is that you still need to have a functioning economy where scare resources are allocated somehow.

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

#457

Post by anigbrowl »

BaseballPhysics wrote: post #302
ihateolives wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As it happens, another big server, Beehaw, just defederated lemmy.world today. So drama has already begun. https://beehaw.org/post/567170

It's not "drama", it's protecting their community from an instance that's currently being bombed by trolls. Seriously, the concern trolling around here regarding federation is almost comical. Apparently when major private corporation admins or volunteer mods arbitrarily intervene in the functioning of a platform it's totally fine, but when local server admins do it by moderating locally or de-federating from problem…

It's not concern trolling, drama exists because everyone gets distracted by organized trolling and federation stans don't have a good answer for this problem.

Federation is confusing and alienating to non-technical users, and nerds who love federation tend to have a mediocre grasp of social dynamics and gloss over the inevitable abuses. Federation stans need to grasp the fact that nobody who is not a full time nerd cares about how federation works at the technical level, they just want a place to socialize with the assurance that they won't be overrun by assholes. All the Federation stans go into it the idea that 'you can just defederate' whereas non-technical users go into it with the idea that they don't want to get raided in the first place.

The existing model of federation is not working. Users don't want to know about the infrastructure any more than people going into a coffee shop want to looka t the architectural blueprints of the building, and federation is clearly unable to pre-empt raiding behavior automatically.

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

#458

Post by MuffinFlavored »

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…

My first reaction is:

there should be an aggregator for all of these instances: https://join-lemmy.org/instances

because my first instinct guess is, there's going to be huge overlap on submissions daily

there's only so much new news daily and a certain niche of people who read it/contribute

scattering them out to a bunch of obscure niche places probably doesn't help

there are even boring days on HackerNews. how many monthly active users does this site have roughly? 500k? 1m? way less?

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

#459

Post by camel-cdr »

soundsgoodtome wrote: post #116
jurassicfoxy wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I just saw the r/StarTrek migration, and visited Lemmy for the 3rd time or so this week, and quite frankly, I could drop reddit entirely now, if I knew how to find communities. I feel some real hacker/dev excitement for the future of Lemmy.

Let us know if/when you figure out how to find communities. Discoverability seems to be a real problem with Lemmy.

I just use the communities tab [0], that's on every instance. Then select All to get a list of all communities federated with this instance sorted by size.

Other wise I just, use the search bar. I just tested it with the goal of finding a photography related community. Found it with the first search result from "photography". [1]

Another example, I wanted to find a risc-v related community, one simple search [2], boom, I found one [3]

[0] e.g.: https://feddit.de/communities/listing_type/All/page/1

[1] https://beehaw.org/search/q/photography/type/All/sort/TopAll...

[2] https://beehaw.org/search/q/riscv/type/All/sort/TopAll/listi...

[3] https://lemmy.ml/c/riscv

Edit: Also, idk how I missed it, but the communities tab [0] also has a search, so there you go, I don't even know what else you'd want.

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

#460

Post by roastedoolong »

goostavos wrote: post #262
indymike wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also most people don’t really care about the API/3rd party app thing. It doesn’t impact them and it looks from the outside like a bunch of dorks with no lives getting worked up over nothing. This may be a case where certain people are more important than most people. > looks from the outside like a bunch of dorks It appears the "dorks" are the certain people who have been making Reddit work for most people.

Are they? Despite everyone saying this, Reddit seems to be humming along. I log onto the front page and have something of the "normal" reddit experience. For instance, "heh. Look at that fish, that's crazy". I mindlessly scroll past all the "REDDIT IS BEING BAD" posts the same way I scroll past Youtube drama posts, or "How Elon is ruining Twitter" drama posts. I'm here to look at funny pictures. Maybe I'm in a revers…

for what it's worth, each of my top 5 subreddits (some with millions of subs) have all gone dark.

maybe you're just really into meme/imgur post type stuff that doesn't have nearly the dedicated user base as other, more text-heavy subreddits?*

* this isn't a read; the example you gave (a picture of a weird looking fish) seems like the kind of content I described

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