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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

#551

Post by Accujack »

jasode wrote: post #487
Animats wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>It suffers from the same problem as Mastodon - "Join a server". But which one? [...] USENET had that problem solved. It was federated, but it didn't look federated to the end user. USENET also had the "chose the wrong server" problem. If I chose my ISP (e.g. Verizon) as my USENET entry point, then I would miss out on many newsgroups that Verizon didn't have. Or, Verizon had the newsgroup but had extremely short rete…

This is actually as designed, and is a good thing.

It creates the possibility for a business model where subscribers pay for access to a big news spool and lots of groups. Just like USENet.

There will be some growing pains, but there will eventually be a continuum of "free" lemmy servers, for pay premium ones, and lemmy servers where the front end is only an app on your phone.

And they'll all see the same messages.

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

#552

Post by anigbrowl »

chongli wrote: post #399
nullityrofl wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Centralization works. It's convenient. It doesn't require a user guide. It's approachable for laypersons. It works until it doesn’t: when the host of a centralized community decides to make enemies with its users. This is an old story for many people who went through the Digg to Reddit migration. Now people have had enough. Our communities are too important to leave in the hands of one company. It’s time for all the…

I'm with you 100% on the goal here, what fediverse skeptics like me keep trying to point out is that it's not going to work if you first require every user to learn nerd stuff. Most people are part of multiple communities, some which overlap and some which do not. The whole process of choosing an instance in order to figure out the fediverse is broken, because it assumes people one-dimensional, and forces them into making a fundamentally meaningless choice as their first user experience.

It's based on a metaphor of the body in a physical place, that doesn't really work online. As I mentioned in another comment, this is like offering to give someone a ticket to an exciting foreign city, but before they can get the ticket they have to choose where they're going to eat lunch when they arrive. This alienates people because they have no context for choosing between instances so forcing this choice on them as a condition of signing up is good way to maximize your bounce rate.

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

#553

Post by anigbrowl »

shagie wrote: post #534
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.

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…

No emoji. No reaction gifs. No memes.

So none of the things many people like. I loved usenet back int he 1990s, but the refusal to adapt to what users like to do is a large part of what killed it.

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

#554

Post by redundantly »

nullityrofl wrote: post #523
redundantly wrote: post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not sure if this is meant to be some kind of childish insult or gotcha but no: I'm talking in representation of luddites. No, it's an observation. You're insisting things have to work a certain way in order for them to have value and be usable. Things don't have to operate in a specific, fixed way. Saying decentralisation will never catch on because it doesn't fit your description of accessibility is like sayin…

> You're insisting things have to work a certain way in order for them to have value and be usable. Things don't have to operate in a specific, fixed way. No, I'm not. I'm staying on the topic of the thread you're posting in: Reddit's future and where people may or may not migrate to. You're doing exactly what I accused the creators of Fediverse technologies are doing: fixating on the ideology and taking an opportuni…

> Federated services will never become mainstream

> Centralization works... It's approachable for laypersons.

You are arguing that things will not change because it doesn't work in a very specific way. I'm replying to what you said. This isn't a straw man argument.

There doesn't need to be a direct replacement for Reddit. Things don't have to continue to work like that. Your assumption of what's difficult to do isn't an absolute. People have shown they're able to adopt new ideas, new ways of doing things.

> I'm talking in representation of luddites.

You're not giving enough credit to society. They're not cattle. They don't just sit in a field and chew cud.

Mindsets and ideologies change. How technology is used changes. Your insistence that there has to be a direct, fully equivalent replacement for Reddit to be successful is incorrect.

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

#555

Post by yardstick »

kristopolous wrote: post #522
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ICQ? AIM? AOL chat rooms? 1988 versus 1996 and 1997, respectively. AOL proper was an IRC competitor, as was CompuServe, but their definitions of working weren't different from IRC's.

That's not a useful comparison. The fact that IRC existed in 1988 does not bring a user onboard in 2004. That same argument didn't save WAIS, Fido, or Gopher. Nor did it keep Tymnet or Bitnet around and didn't give Compuserve and The Well a seat at the winners table. It also wasn't a saving grace for Friendster, MySpace, or LiveJournal. Magnavox putting out the first home gaming console in 1972 hasn't made them a gam…

Probably a few reasons.

Text only, transient/short life data, is a lot cheaper to process and serve than images, permanent posts, etc.

It won the initial buy-in of us geeks/nerds/hackers/whateverthephraseofthedayis who gave it a rather solid base.

It’s a very personal type of communication. Real-time, immediate, and to a lot smaller audience (more intimate) compared to web forums, Reddit etc.

And finally, I would posit that it did actually die. What remains now is small, compared to how popular the likes of Reddit Twitter etc are, vs how popular IRC was in its heyday.

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

#556

Post by labster »

kibwen wrote: post #104
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 old.reddit.com may not be long for this world. i.reddit.com and reddit.com/.compact were both removed earlier this year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35283379 (The irony now of that top comment, "99.5% of my usage is through the iOS client Apollo"...)

Right now, 100% of my usage is old.reddit.com and 0% of my usage is on the new design. These numbers won’t change if they remove old reddit — I’ll just stop using the site.

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

#557

Post by basch »

MisterBastahrd wrote: post #446
basch wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

reddit and steve are too overconfident to see and realize that joining federation is their path to survival. fear and denial will drive them to build garden walls when they should be transforming to stay ahead of obsolescence. turning into tiktok is fad chasing and a means to end of times, destruction, and relegation to has been status. myspace and tumblr realized too latomethi/ng e, and their transformations were ne…

We HAD an ubiquitous, federated social network that was widely used and it died because the real world has more sharp edges than the stuff of dreams.

I did stumble upon hubzilla/zot which looks closer to what I described than lemmy|mastadon. https://zotlabs.org/help/en/about/about#Glossary

What are you describing? Email? The Web? PGP?

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

#559

Post by anigbrowl »

BaseballPhysics wrote: post #542
anigbrowl wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Why are you pretending that this isn't confusing to newbies? I'm not. Absolutely the onboarding experience can be improved. The problem is you're losing the plot, here. The original commenter complained about having to "read up on what rights server admins have over my account, why I should choose one versus another, which servers are de-federating which others, et cetera." But you don't have to do that if you don'…

It's 'being improved' even though it's been identified as a problem from the outset of the fediverse, nearly a decade ago. I don't know how to make this any simpler:

Forced choices drive away users. People don't like making decisions without context because they feel like scams. That's why uptake is slow almost a decade into federation. The UX model is bad.

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

#560

Post by leesalminen »

sharperguy wrote: post #472
Animats wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Nice thing about nostr is your account isn't tied to a server. The servers are just relays, and your messages are authenticated via pgp key. So your client will present you with a default set of servers, and if you need to change it later you don't need to recreate an account to do so, just tweak a setting. The nostr community right now mostly want to replace twitter rather than reddit, but in principle it would be p…

I’ve been thinking about the “relays as subreddits” paradigm for nostr. It could work.
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