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

Subreddit Migration Directory

redditmigration.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 144 posts

Re: Subreddit Migration Directory

#91

Post by planb »

swores wrote: post #70
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…

Why would you not expect egos and personal ideologies to affect both admins and mods somewhere like Reddit, they're people just like Fediverse volunteers? Aren't they both the same on that side, meaning the only difference is that one of them also has commercial interests in the mix?

The absolutely do. I'm sure there are feuding subreddits about the same topic. But reddit as a platform allows them both (because it's their business interest), so with one account you can see both.

Re: Subreddit Migration Directory

#92

Post by planb »

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.

But then federated services operate on the level of a single subreddit, not that of reddit. That's fine, but they will never replace social networks (which unfortunately means we'll have to live with big corps running those).

Re: Subreddit Migration Directory

#93

Post by pera »

skissane wrote: post #89
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.

> 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"…

Big e-mail providers are actually worse, they usually go like "so, a neighbour of yours sent something that somehow triggered our anti-spam system ages ago, so fuck your messages and fuck you, 221 Bye!"

At least on Mastodon you get the chance to talk to someone and try to solve the conflict.

Re: Subreddit Migration Directory

#94

Post by lexandstuff »

Gareth321 wrote: post #82
lexandstuff wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-specifi…

I miss forums. But every forum I frequented in the early 2000s eventually shut down, and we lost the data forever. I don't see how federated servers will be any different.

At least with Reddit, there's an entity working towards building a sustainable solution to keep it running. That is, until some moderators decided to close the communities and hide our contributions.

Anyway, my point is: vote with your feet and leave Reddit if you want. But don't vandalise the site on your way out, ruining it for everyone else.

Re: Subreddit Migration Directory

#95

Post by skissane »

pera wrote: post #93
skissane wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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"…

Big e-mail providers are actually worse, they usually go like "so, a neighbour of yours sent something that somehow triggered our anti-spam system ages ago, so fuck your messages and fuck you, 221 Bye!" At least on Mastodon you get the chance to talk to someone and try to solve the conflict.

Big e-mail providers are primarily concerned with spam–which is defined by the volume and unsolicited nature of the messages, rather than the opinions they express. Sometimes their attempts at stopping it impose collateral damage, and their response to that collateral damage can be arbitrary and capricious–but that's a different issue from what we are talking about with Mastodon coordinated de-federation, which is much more intentional than collateral.

The terms of service of those big providers say that they can ban people for "hate speech", but in practice they rarely do that, and on the rather rare occasions they do, it is usually a particularly egregious case of it.

By contrast, the big Mastodon instances seem to be very keen on banning "hate speech" – and defining that term in a much broader way than most other platforms do. See https://joinmastodon.org/covenant point 1

Re: Subreddit Migration Directory

#96

Post by fzeroracer »

p-e-w wrote: post #84
iforgotpassword wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Neither of you seem to get it. You're talking about 'power centralization' in a completely different and orthogonal way from how the federation works, which makes me think you have a fundamental misunderstanding of centralization or federation.

If you're banned from a popular instance you're not banned from the platform as a whole. Because there is no single authority dictating where you can and cannot post, unlike Reddit. It's similar to being specifically banned from a subreddit.

Reddit is a kingdom whose king delegates power to various fiefdoms, but ultimately still controls the land. You are at their whims, as evident by the fact that they're removing mods that disagree with their API policy. Federated instances are multiple kingdoms that share borders which they keep open for the sake of trade. But those borders can close depending on how their neighbors interact.

It's like I said, a return to forums or IRC style governing except the authority is the forum or channel itself, and they can link to other forums/channels as they want in a seamless fashion. In order for systems like these to work communities need a way to defederate and control who they connect to, because inevitably bad instances will rise whose sole purpose is spam, harassment etc.

Re: Subreddit Migration Directory

#97

Post by Gareth321 »

lexandstuff wrote: post #94
Gareth321 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-specifi…

I miss forums. But every forum I frequented in the early 2000s eventually shut down, and we lost the data forever. I don't see how federated servers will be any different. At least with Reddit, there's an entity working towards building a sustainable solution to keep it running. That is, until some moderators decided to close the communities and hide our contributions. Anyway, my point is: vote with your feet and lea…

The data is at risk in both scenarios for different reasons. Yes, Lemmy instances can and will shutter. In time, I hope, there will be tools which keep data synchronised between instances for redundancy. Now consider the risks on Reddit. Reddit doesn't want a sustainable platform. They want a profitable platform. Those are very different goals.

1. Reddit has banned and deleted countless users, comments, and subreddits over the years. All of that data is gone forever. The decisions were arbitrary and opaque. The subreddit owners and users weren't even given notice so they could back up the subreddit data and migrate elsewhere.

2. Reddit has and will increasingly demand users access the remaining data using increasingly user hostile channels. The mobile site Reddit experience is all but ruined. They're currently trialing blocking it entirely. The standard desktop website is atrocious. They track everything, and aggressively monetise, meaning ads everywhere. If the data on the site is gated behind intrusive tracking practises, a hostile UX, a plethora of ads, and perhaps in the future even a subscription, do we really have access to that data?

3. Reddit has an incentive to promote advertiser friendly content, and hide other content. This means the main feed is full of content I don't care about. Their search is one of the worst in the industry, and it has been blocking undesirable content for years. The most effective way to find content on Reddit is Google, but Reddit is working hard to break that. About a year or so ago Google could no longer accurately record the submission date, meaning their date searching tools were rendered useless. Shortly after that, Google stopped caching Reddit content. We should expect that Reddit has been working hard to ensure no one can find the "bad" content, and only ever lands on the "good" content. If you can't ever find the relevant data, do we really have access to it?

I just don't see how you could argue that our data is safer with an evil corporation than an army of dedicated users. You claim that mods and/or users are vandalising the site on the way out. We're really just deleting the content we uploaded.

Re: Subreddit Migration Directory

#98

Post by hcks »

Gareth321 wrote: post #71
icapybara wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure but Hacker News in 2015 isn’t on the scale of 2023 Reddit, and isn’t being pitched as an alternative to 2023 Reddit…

Alternatives don’t just appear out of thin air. No one’s going to purchase a huge server farm for a small user base. As Lemmy instances grow, more servers will be purchased. It happens organically.

Purchased with what money? People who migrated did so because ads are evil and 2$ per month is extortionate.

Re: Subreddit Migration Directory

#99

Post by lost_tourist »

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…

That's because beehaw is essentially a giant safe zone and they don't suffer trolls. They got too many trolls from outside so they decided to cut bait.
Post reply on HN