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Subreddit Migration Directory

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Re: Subreddit Migration Directory

#81

Post by Dalewyn »

notRobot wrote: post #65
Dalewyn wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My only takeaway is that the "fediverse" is merely another layer/expression of centralization.

Decentralisation isn't perfect, and has its problems. That doesn't mean it's the same as centralisation.

Decentralization is a loosely connected network of peers not reliant on one or the other. The loss or gain of a peer or peers is of no significant consequence to the peers at large.

Centralization is a network of peers all connected to one hub, reliant on the hub to provide spokes to other peers at large.

The "fediverse" as far as I can tell is a collection of many separate networks that refuse to speak with other networks (for ideological reasons at that, rather than technical), each network acting as a hub and providing spokes to their peers.

It's centralization ("Lemmy", et al.) within a centralization ("fediverse") within a decentralization (internet).

Re: Subreddit Migration Directory

#82

Post by Gareth321 »

lexandstuff wrote: post #22
jcz_nz wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Literally, the very point is that there is no “they”.

Well, someone has to pay to run the servers that host each federated sub-Lemmy (or whatever they call it). People have to write the core code and fix the bugs, which they presumably are paying for in free labour. Someone has to pay the CI costs for the core project etc. They might not all be part of the same organisation, but there will be plenty of people in the ecosystem operating at a loss. If they're happy with t…

Lemmy and Kbin are opensource, so there are no dev costs. That’s a big one. The other is hosting. Of course servers aren’t free, so each instance will need to figure out how they keep the lights on. Way back in the before times (2000), we used to host forums on our own computers, or pay for basic hosting. Maybe $50/m, though it’s much cheaper these days. This was fine because we went to these forums for topic-specific discussion and they were generally quite small compared to Reddit of today. Lemmy and ActivityPub in general is perfect for this because it connects these thousands of little servers. To me, this is marrying the best of what we had 20 years ago with the best of what we have today.

I should remind you that Reddit isn’t asking for $20 million annually from Apollo to merely cover their costs. They have a very healthy profit margin baked into that fee. So even if we were to pay for a competitor, it would cost a lot less than that. This, combined with the decentralised nature of Lemmy, means these costs can be nicely distributed over tens of thousands of people, using small donations here and there to keep the lights on. This isn’t the insurmountable problem you seem to believe it to be.

Re: Subreddit Migration Directory

#84

Post by p-e-w »

iforgotpassword wrote: post #78
fzeroracer wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not an issue, that's the intent of federation. It's IRC/Forums etc but at a larger scale where you can more easily connect to similar channels and forums. You either accept that communities have the right to self-police whom they can talk to or not, or accept that you want a central authority to do that for you.

IRC and forums have nothing to do with federation. Maybe IRC if you look at the channel level, but there's still network-wide rules you need to follow or get banned, just like forums have one or more admins with a final say. The fediverse is just random scattered kingdoms having fragile connections. There have been so many attempts at it for the past 20 years or so, but people just don't want to accept that it cannot…

> The fediverse is just random scattered kingdoms having fragile connections.

Indeed. And each "kingdom" has the exact same problem with power centralization that the Fediverse supposedly solves. And the more popular an instance becomes, the bigger this problem gets. And the more popular an instance becomes, the more people will join it. And boom, we're back to zero.

Re: Subreddit Migration Directory

#86

Post by codetrotter »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #57
unclekev wrote: post #19

Just went to the 'Programming' lemmy/beehaw and the first thing I see is a post about how they have had to defederate from some instances because of a lack of proper mod tools, trolls and bad actors. The irony. > https://beehaw.org/post/567170 > these two instances’ open registration policy, which is extremely problematic for us given how federation works and how trivial it makes trolling, harassment, and other undes…

And there you have it. Reddit has solved both performance / scalability and moderation, and thinking it can be solved by going distributed / federated is naive. Every Reddit alternative has failed / is not as successful is because of this.

> not as successful

How do you measure success? Number of users? Number of posts and comments?

It is possible to have a small community with few people and less activity, that maintains a higher quality of content than a bigger community with more people.

The main danger of being small might be the threat of becoming an echo chamber because you are not exposed to as much variety in ideas. But even big communities sometimes do a “pretty good job at” (i.e. succumb to) becoming an echo chamber.

Re: Subreddit Migration Directory

#87

Post by p-e-w »

stevenwliao wrote: post #80
p-e-w wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People will literally create blacklists of sites, and if you don't follow the blacklist you'll get added to it. This is why the Fediverse cannot work. More precisely, it can work, but only in the same way as the thing it tries to replace. It's always the same story: The largest communities impose their rules on everyone else, under threat of exclusion from those communities. This creates power structures that are a…

When people disagree about the direction of a community, someone has to not get their way. There's no avoiding this in any group.

Which is exactly why the Fediverse doesn't solve anything. It's the most powerful trampling over everyone else – just like on Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter. The Fediverse is yet another middleman brokering communication between individuals, with all the associated problems.

Re: Subreddit Migration Directory

#88

Post by fdgjgbdfhgb »

yardstick wrote: post #79

Devils advocate: The poor showing of migrated communities - both low volume of migrations, and poor performance of the servers running them, isn’t helping the cause. Like, I look at that list and the broken-overloaded lemmys running them and I can’t help but think this is why Reddit is successful and will continue to be successful. Because very, very few will put up with such a poor experience the alternatives offer.…

Tô be fair, Reddit had a long time to grow organically, it didn't just spawn with millions of users overnight - same for most subreddits.

Still, users now expect an active community and a fast and reliable website right now, not in 10 years.

Lemmy/Kbin/whatever is not going to _replace_ Reddit today, and I don't think they ever meant to replace it all at once... but maybe they can keep growing and eventually get there.

Re: Subreddit Migration Directory

#89

Post by skissane »

fzeroracer wrote: post #68
guywithahat wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the biggest issues with the fediverse imo is moderation. People will literally create blacklists of sites, and if you don't follow the blacklist you'll get added to it. You end up in these situations where there are completely separate versions of the fediverse and the largest instances will often not be able to talk to each other. At least before Elon bought Twitter I know the most active (depending on how yo…

That's not an issue, that's the intent of federation. It's IRC/Forums etc but at a larger scale where you can more easily connect to similar channels and forums. You either accept that communities have the right to self-police whom they can talk to or not, or accept that you want a central authority to do that for you.

> That's not an issue, that's the intent of federation

People keep on comparing Mastodon to email.

But, have you ever tried to send someone an email and had the email rejected with an error from your email provider saying "You can't talk to that domain because it insufficiently polices hate speech" or even "You can't talk to that domain because it lets its users talk to domains that insufficiently police hate speech"? Yet my impression of Mastodon is it is just like that.

Which makes Mastodon in practice a very different type of federation from email.

Re: Subreddit Migration Directory

#90

Post by skissane »

malermeister wrote: post #63
none_to_remain wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think many people implicitly desire that the federation graph is complete, or practically nearly-complete with some pariah servers cut off. To put it differently, they want to be "user@host" in a system with a global namespace, not "user" in the "host" namespace with patchy access to others.

The problem is that a complete graph doesn't really make sense because people are different and find different things acceptable. I don't want Nazi shit on my reddit replacement. I'm assuming a lot of people here wouldn't want theirs to be full of commie shit. Then there's the religious nuts etc etc. Think of it less as censorship and more as community self-segregation. I wouldn't go to a Nazi bar or Sunday school in…

Do you care if your email provider happens to give accounts to Nazis or communists or religious nuts, if you never happen to exchange emails with them? Do you care if your web host happens to host their websites?

Why should a "federated Reddit replacement" have to be any different? If you subscribe to subs X and Y and Z, and none of that stuff is in those subs, does it matter to you if the instance (or other instances it federates with) contains other subs–which you never visit–that do have it?

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