Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Reddit’s blackout protest is set to continue indefinitely

old.reddit.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

651–660 of 795 posts

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

#651

Post by FalconSensei »

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…

Honest question: for the user, how does the federation work if your "subreddits" (sublemmies?) are scattered between 10 different instances? On Mastodon it's quite a pain sometimes, if you open a link to someone else's instance, and then have to copy their link and paste on your instance to be able to follow

I think this is probably way harder/more annoying on lemmy, since if I have 1 user on abc.xyz, and I also browse and want to comment/upvote on qwerty.cxz and asdf.rocks

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

#652

Post by Logans_Run »

Would it be possible to create a read-only instance that was federated with every single other instance? Possibly there is already one or it's been tried and didn't work but the way I envision it is this -

You sign up to the read-only instance and can see the entire fediverse's contents and posts and when/if you wanted to comment, the app would let you know that you had to sign up to the instance the comment came from to post your own comment and take you that instance's sign-up page.

One of the biggest turn-offs for me was finding which ones to join and/or had content I was or might be interested in.

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

#653

Post by leokennis »

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…

So well said. After the Twitter apocalypse I joined Mastodon, but the instance I joined (mastodon.world) was missing a lot of people that did advertise they were on Mastodon… So I clicked some links from those people and managed to follow them. But I cannot just search for people or topics now? I first need a link to another instance? What is this, a second job?

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

#654

Post by FormerBandmate »

pauby wrote: post #644
FormerBandmate wrote: post #624

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a horrible way to get the mass market. It seems like a perfect way to recreate the issues with desktop Linux

That's assuming the goal is to get to 'mass market'. Lemmy existed before the Reddit exodus. It will exist when they all go back.

In that case, why even bring up Lemmy as a Reddit alternative? It just serves to attract people who won’t be good users and waste their time

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

#655

Post by nullityrofl »

yadingus wrote: post #586
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…

It works for what? Take a step back. What is social media achieving in its current state. If you only look at the shiny cat videos and dances and memes, that's not the purpose. The purpose is the mass collection of data. If your only standard of "is working" is "it's what the majority uses", then yes, "it works". But do you really want that to be your standard? Just number of users, at any cost? If you're competing a…

If you think Reddit is social media in the same sense that Facebook is then I think we're coming at this from very difficult angles.

Reddit is more akin to Wikipedia than it is to Facebook at this point for many people. Yes, much of the popularity comes from interacting with others but it's also become a hive of up-to-date information and opinions for hobbies, for trades, etc.

If I start a new hobby I don't need to go find the 10 year old abandoned page or the SEO manipulated AI generated summary. I just go to /r/hobby. New espresso machine? /r/espresso. I want to know what 3d printer to buy? /r/3dprinters. Damage to my roof? /r/roofing. I don't know how to do some maintenance on my house? /r/homeowners. I need to buy a new car but I don't know how to get a good deal? /r/askcarsales.

There's a lot more at play here than the stale "social media bad, algorithms manipulate society" take.

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

#656

Post by brewdad »

anigbrowl wrote: post #559
BaseballPhysics wrote: post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Picking a user name is a forced choice. By your logic, nobody would ever want to join a social media platform that didn't automatically assign a user name.

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

#657

Post by FormerBandmate »

leokennis wrote: post #653
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…

So well said. After the Twitter apocalypse I joined Mastodon, but the instance I joined (mastodon.world) was missing a lot of people that did advertise they were on Mastodon… So I clicked some links from those people and managed to follow them. But I cannot just search for people or topics now? I first need a link to another instance? What is this, a second job?

Truth Social is the most successful Mastodon instance by far despite being garbage because it has a clear, consistent design and user interface, and has exclusive content from an extremely popular influencer. Any Mastodon or Lemmy instance that wants to truly replace Reddit needs that, Gmail doesn’t present itself as a federated messaging platform and make you jump through 30 hoops to join while having arbitrary management that bans at random

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

#658

Post by BashiBazouk »

rwetgerger wrote: post #107
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…

I only use Reddit logged out. Are there any apps that give me the same logged out experience with Lemmy?

The base Lemmy site does allow that. It looks like every button should lead to sign up dialogs but doesn't. Just select a serer, then join a server, hit communities at the top and select all in the green menu. I don't know if it shows you everything but it does give many pages of topics and what server they are on.

The interface is not up to old.reddit standards but better than the modern reddit interface. I like that because there many servers, any popular topic will have a bunch of subs to choose from. Seems a bit sparse with subscriber numbers per community but if that grows, I could see it scratching the reddit itch...

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

#659

Post by seydor »

idiotsecant wrote: post #625
seydor wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Moderators are more than guilty of abusing their powers. Reddit should remove powers from them instead of enabling. They can easily find replacements

What you're saying here sounds to me like "I think the current moderators are bad, get rid of them all and get new ones who will be much better" I have some ...doubts about how well something like this would work in practice. Burning large systems down and starting over is generally not more efficient than tweaking the system you have.

Governments are burnt down every four years

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

#660

Post by RoyGBivCap »

smbullet wrote: post #436
ahahahahah wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "major" subreddits you listed are ranked #74, #76, #77, #4020, #946, #165, #875, #2324, and #1584 by posts per day. The claim that they are "keeping reddit alive basically" is rather generous.

Subreddit posts per day is really not a great metric to track engagement. You probably want comments or votes per day.

Isn't the rule of thumb 1/9/99 where 1% post, 9% comment, 99% lurk?

Or something like that.

Post reply on HN