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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

#531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes. Joe Blow consumer just wants access to all the amazing free content on Reddit. Unfortunately, the people who create that content (1% of users) are currently getting screwed over by Reddit. So my appeal to join lemmy is not aimed at Joe Blow, it’s aimed at the actual contributors who make communities possible. If enough of them switch over then lemmy will gain critical mass, and the rest is history. Joe Blow can…

> it’s aimed at the actual contributors who make communities possible

Contributors generally create content because they want it to be seen by more than a handful of nerds and don't want it to disappear within weeks because their instance has ran out of money.

Those contributors will either stop contributing for good, go back to Reddit (because it's still a better experience than any of the "fediverse" bullshit) or jump ship the second an actually competent company builds a centralized alternative that just works.

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

#532
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…

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.

I'm pretty active in r/3DPrinting and r/FixMyPrint, and strongly support the blackout. I've been avoiding Reddit entirely and getting my news from other sources, while also exploring the fediverse. I had no idea about the rhombik instance/magazine/whatever.

The core problem with the migration is that the information on where to go EXACTLY is hosted on the platform being boycotted. I decided to not visit Reddit anymore and watch for instances to pop up on the fediverse. If others do the same, the migration will be slow. Don't be discouraged if it takes a few days to pick up steam. There's another 3DPrinting magazine that has some users already. https://kbin.social/m/3dprinting@lemmy.world or https://lemmy.world/c/3dprinting

That leads to the second problem of on-boarding migrating users to a highly distributed platform. I've mentioned in the boycott server the need for "racks" (the subjects within instances are called magazines, this would be a collection). These would be moderated aggregators of instances, like the invisible step between lots of disparate subreddits. There would be no limit of the number of racks, so technically you could have a permutation of every associated magazine-instance combination. The purpose would be to have a single link new users can click on to get subscribed to a set of magazines all at once, basically making the federation concept seamless to less technical users while still highly flexible on the backend. I'm going to shoot the suggestion up the chain for kbin.

We want to avoid leaving folks like this: https://lemmy.world/post/97417

That leads to the third problem, which is all these alternatives are new and going through growing pains. Trying to add features comes second to keeping the service stable. I'm hoping others with more coding experience can assist kbin devs.

And I wanted to mention that last I heard (and saw evidence of), some of the main Lemmy devs were kinda garbage people (Tiananmen Square massacre supporters, not just questionable opinions on government). The more controversial instances have been defederated from the primary/intake server, but it's still worth mentioning. Kbin doesn't have that baggage, but there are only a couple devs, and really only one main dev, last I heard.

Kbin users can see and respond to Lemmy and Mastodon instances that are federated, so it has been the migration choice for most of the Reddit boycott groups.

edit: btw - I just looked at the comments on the one post. If you want to run a poll, fine, but most of the people protesting won't be there to vote. I thought the 3D printing subs were largely positive and supporting, if those comments represent the community I was supporting, I now have zero qualms about deleting my comments on Reddit.

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

#533
post #19

The biggest Reddit communities are in open rebellion. Twitter is, charitably, a mess. Twitch started taking a full 50% of the revenue of their top creators, who are furious. What's going on? What's the bigger trend that's causing all these platforms to go so user-hostile?

> What's going on?

VC money is drying up and these companies need to turn a profit now finally

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

#534
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…

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.

Out of curiosity... why not alt.startrek?

Other than the "not a lot is happening there now", but there's some activity.

The most recent posts on the server I'm on:

    The Lower Decks crossover to live action in Strange New Worlds
    Star Trek Discovery Canceled
    ‘Galaxy Quest’ TV Series in Early  Development at Paramount+
    Jack Crusher is how old?
    Star Trek The Lower Decks S03E09 was everything I wanted.
    (spam - into the kill file that poster went)
    TOS Film marathon
    (crossposted trolling - more kill file material)
    Captain Burnham mob/cops/big city episodes (Star Trek Discovery)
    (crossposted trolling - figured out how to do more complicated rules - "cross posted to more than 3 groups and newsgroups match \.politics\." with this reader)
    (crossposted trolling - even more kill file material)
    Ode to Spot. (this post is from 2012)
    When will the new Star Trek merge with the Twilight movies? (this post is from (2011)
No emoji. No reaction gifs. No memes.

Just text content.

edit: and as I write this, a new post just showed up in the past 2 minutes about Strange New Words S02E01.

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

#535

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.

Or folks could learn how to do this stuff.

'Documentation? Just learn programming and it will be obvious.'

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

#536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try a Garolite Bed. Get a sheet about 1 to 2mm thick. Yes, that is PCB material. It is fantastic! Use the smaller sized office clamps to hold it in place. These can be placed on a few sides. Check that they do not collide with your printhead. Then, prep it with a light ScotchBrite scrub. Just enough to see the light abrasive marks and a bit of texture in the surface. Finish with high purity isopropyl and a dry cloth…

Some notes about my setup: Ender 3 v2 (textured glass bed), added a CR Touch, swapped out the bronze for a hardened steel nozzle, and installed Klipper firmware. I have PLA, PLA+, and PETG, I dried the PETG at I think 140F (convection oven) for 6ish hours, and then was finally able to print a Benchy boat if I set my first layer print speed to 5-10mm/s. I tried to print something that had small shapes on the first lay…

I have used glass garolite pei and a number of other things.

The garolite and the Pei are similar. I prefer the G10 because it's stiffer and it doesn't wear away as easily and it seems to be a little more consistent in how it behaves. But either can work.

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

#537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Creating an ideological and technical filter at the mouth of the funnel is absurd. So then just pick a large, popular instance and be done with it. You've already made it clear you don't care what the platform's policies are, so why are you pretending this is a barrier?

Why are you pretending that this isn't confusing to newbies? You are the archetypal technical person snapping about the workaround instead of engaging with the user problem. If everyone can have access to all the content (which is what most people want), why are they being herded into choosing an instance in the first place? Federation might run 100x better if instances were suggested based on geographic proximity ra…

[deleted]

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

#538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some notes about my setup: Ender 3 v2 (textured glass bed), added a CR Touch, swapped out the bronze for a hardened steel nozzle, and installed Klipper firmware. I have PLA, PLA+, and PETG, I dried the PETG at I think 140F (convection oven) for 6ish hours, and then was finally able to print a Benchy boat if I set my first layer print speed to 5-10mm/s. I tried to print something that had small shapes on the first lay…

You have a damaged feed path somehow. There is a PTFE tube in there that's supposed to help guide the filament and it is damaged. If you can't do a cold pull nothing will work because the shape of the filament will change inside the feed path and it will bind up. Some hot ends do not have the PTFE tube, but they have metal parts that must be mated together precisely in order for the polymer to flow through. If there…

The cold pull is with the PTFE tubing taken out but yeah, I didn't realize how cheap it was to replace/upgrade the hot end, I will just do that. Thanks for the tip!

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

#539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Raiding behavior" has been around forever, including on Usenet. It's not a serious objection to federation, since "raids" and other obnoxious behavior can happen irrespective of it.

I'm not objecting to federation as such, I'm objecting to the belief that users want to become federation evangelists in order to engage in social conversation. It's limiting the uptake of federated services because it forces users into making a meaningless-seeming choice before they can participate. When I show a site like Lemmy to my non-technical friends, their eyes glaze over and they are confused by the necessit…

> When I show a site like Lemmy to my non-technical friends, their eyes glaze over

That's quite understandable actually, the Lemmy UX sucks. Try showing them fedibb.ml instead. It's Lemmy under the hood, and federation works perfectly - but you'd never guess that!

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

#540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we do largely agree here. However, I think it should be noted that the current migration is largely driven by moderators and power-users, not the 90% of users that don't really care, so I don't think there actually is any competitive opportunity. I think that you're right in that the sign up UX is not great - there are also serious performance concerns, and in many ways the platform isn't ready yet. But I don…

> current migration is largely driven by moderators and power-users, not the 90% of users that don't really care, so I don't think there actually is any competitive opportunity Power users' power is users. We've frequently seen the celebs-first gambit by new social media entrants, most notably Clubhouse, and while it can generate hype for a bit, it's far from a proven strategy. It's frustrating to watch a re-play of…

By power users, I'm referring to the small minority that generated the vast majority of content on Reddit. It's true that it isn't a proven strategy, but given that the Lemmy ecosystem has gotten around 100k users in the past 2-3 days, it's not failing as bad as it could be.
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