It’s been a long journey, but here we arrive. Welcome home.
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I think even calling it Lemmy is not the right move. Yeah, Lemmy is the server software running on a bunch of instances. But we also have kbin, and new softwares will pop up and fork and come and go over time. Once we can do some kind of account or community level migration, it won’t matter whether you are on Lemmy or kbin or the next great thing. Everything will be federated so it will inter-op beautifully. If an unfriendly instance admin comes along, we can collectively cut and run with minimal interruption.
Thats still a way off from where we are now but the hard step was getting to the Fediverse in the first place. So, welcome to the newcomers among us.
this is the future nerds like me have been imagining since the early 2000’s
Laughs in BBS
or
Laughs in Newgroups
Web Rings. Remember those?
They’re making a comeback, somehow: https://webring.xxiivv.com/
Oh, I love this.
Throwing this in the “fun retro internet” pile alongside https://neocities.org/
Neocities has been around for years now… I have a website there… I do wonder if it’s getting bigger though.
Seems like every old school platform is getting some sort of resurgence these days, and honestly it’s understandable - the collapse of modern social media has created a wave of nostalgia for the good old days of the dot com era.
And its newest form https://neopets.com/
I still use both. 99% of Usenet is spam, but there still a few active groups (especially under comp.*). The BBS scene on the other hand, is booming. I see new users every week on my favourite board.
How does a current day BBS work? Landline phone connections are a thing of the past here.
ssh and/or telnet.
FidoNet :D
Yeah, lemmy does have a certain BBS/FidoNet vibe. Makes me nostalgic…
I think the concept of the Fediverse is still really alien to people, even the people who are using it. Everyone is still so used to their centralized platforms, so they still think of the Fediverse in terms of platforms rather than as a whole.
You still hear people say “Mastodon” to mean the microblogging corner of the Fediverse even if they’re not actually on Mastodon, and now people say “Lemmy” to mean the link aggregation corner of the Fediverse even if not everyone is actually on Lemmy.
I recently found and like the term “threadiverse” for reddit-like federated software
I really like that, I’m gonna do my part to spread it!
Maybe this is an unpopular opinion but the word “Fediverse” leaves a sour taste in my mount just because it sounds so much like the stupidity that was “Metaverse” (yes I know they are completely unrelated)
Are you saying there’s other reddit-like/inspired webservices that are part of the fediverse that aren’t Lemmy? What are those?
Currently kbin is the only one I am aware of.
Kbin already exists, and a decent portion of people are switching over. It’s still early days though, so it remains to be seen how it all plays out.
Yep, and that’s totally fair.
undefined> calling it Lemmy is not the right move.
Spankin’ new here, so what do I know, but while the semantics might not be completely accurate, that is not an uncommon occurrence. And Lemmy sounds personal, with a bit of a Motorhead edge to it.
Maybe we’ll all be called Lemmies web slinging in the Fediverse one day.
Yup, having a name is a pretty important aspect of growth. And while the fediverse could certainly work, it’s not very intuitive for new users and also covers such a broad range of functionalities that it won’t help people who are specifically looking for a Reddit alternative. Sure ‘lemmy’ is a misnomer, but it’s better to have a name being used incorrectly than no name at all.
It’s funny to read this article about the death of Digg again:
In reality, Digg changed their business model and pretended that they didn’t. That is something that is unacceptable with communities and won’t be forgotten. Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian hit the nail on the head in an open letter to (now former) Digg CEO – Kevin Rose:
“You chose to grow with venture capital and you’ve no doubt (I hope) taken some money off the table in your Series C round. I say this because this new version of digg reeks of VC meddling. It’s cobbling together features from more popular sites and departing from the core of digg, which was to “give the power back to the people.”https://searchengineland.com/digg-v4-how-to-successfully-kill-a-community-50450>
Sadly, this is the only logical conclusion of things that are run for profit. Here’s hoping the federated model proves more resistant in the long run.
Funding, even in a not-for-profit sense, will always be an issue. Wikipedia struggles, but kinda makes it work. We’re going to need something creative for the fediverse…
that doesn’t really hold because Wikipedia does not struggle with funding in the sense you’re thinking: https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/wikipedia-millions-bank-beg/
so, survival doesn’t necessarily have to be at stake
In the medium run federated instances will have to be financed somehow as well. We’ll see how that goes.
Depends on how many volunteers you have who are actually willing to donate
You’re missing the precursors:
Email -> Newsgroups -> CGI forums / IRC -> Slashdot… :)
The new Fediverse really is kicking up IRC and newsgroup vibes for this old timer. Its very exciting.
As a really old person, I was thinking today the vibe was unlike anything I’ve felt since Fidonet ;)
Lots of similarities between Lemmy and FIDOnet. I’ve been saying this to anyone that will listen.
LORD
If we’re including those then I think we have gone full circle and are back in the safe waters of protocols
I never really used email socially, was always a chat or some bulltin system
IRC is STILL running to this day
Yup, and some servers are very active.
+1 you’re right. Especially IRC…oh how I miss those days.
There are still some good communities out there. I’m still on IRC every day.
It’s about the only constant over internet use from 1994 to present. IRC and E-mail. Also the web kind of, but it’s changed so so much.
As a really old person, I was thinking today the vibe was unlike anything I’ve felt since Fidonet ;)
Lots of similarities between Lemmy and FIDOnet. I’ve been saying this to anyone that will listen.
Usenet! Those were the days.
The Fediverse seems like an interesting idea, but I hope it actually holds together.
The bar for being Reddit circa 2010 isn’t that high to be fair, I know expectations have changed but Reddit was down intermittently for years to the point I’m amazed it got the traction it did in hindsight. People talk about Lemmy having tankies on it as though early Reddit didn’t have some even worse unsavoury subs and users too.
A lot of instances block the tankie instance anyways.
Which instances are tankie-related?
I figured lemmygrad is a tankie instance, but is lemmy.ml another tankie instance?
They seem ok for commies.
lemmy.ml isn’t explicitly “tankie” but the main devs are and the moderation will include not allowing posts/comments critical of China/Russia/communism/etc.
No kidding, wasn’t r/jailbait the biggest sub for a while there?
There were and are to this day a ton of subs with similar content.
I imagine as Mastodon and Lemmy pick up more users, we’ll see a lot of activity and improvements in the underlying tech of the fediverse. Should be a fun ride, especially since it’s in the hands of the community.
Let’s see if the technology can improve fast enough to retain users.
Let people on other platforms know that we exist! Lol
It’ll be great to see more people showing up on Lemmy.
People are so confused and overwhelmed about the fediverse mechanics though.
Maybe there is room for a product that is an aggregator for aggregators. Like, a centralised service that scrapes and collects all Lemmy instances into one super instance.
Its actually simple. Tell them, its like Email. You have an email account at gmail, but can perfectly fine have email conversation with someone on outllook. Lemmy instance = the same as a web email interface of any email provider. Most people will get their head around that.
As soon as you have to explain the fediverse to someone using analogies my experience is that most people have already given up. They just can’t be bothered to learn something new.
exactly.
and I am even gonna question whether that is a good thing for this use case. I get that it’s cool for the idealists and techy folks. decentralized and all that.but for exchanging links and discussing them, what an aggregator is supposed to be, you just want everything in one place. that is what people asking for a super instance mean. there is just too much friction to get there, imho.
in the side bar on my instance-of-choice, there is a link to a community browser. but if you click on a community on a different instance it sends you to that instance. i.e. you are logged out. so you cannot just click ‘subscribe’. You have to go back to your own instance > communities > all > start typing > now you can finally subscribe.
ain’t nobody got time for that!For what it’s worth, there is an issue on staying on the same instance when clicking on a different instance’s community and dessalines agreed with the concept, so we might be seeing a change there soon.
Ohhhh I kept hearing the email analogy but never WHY it was like email. Thanks for the ELI5!
Great description. Im stealing that one
Pardon my confusion since I’m new to the fediverse as well, but isn’t every Lemmy instance like the super instance you are describing? You can access any community on any instance from any other; there are commentors in this thread from beehaw.org, lemmy.world, lemmy.sdf.org, programming.dev, and many others.
Nah those are like sibling instances. I’m talking about a parent instance that combines all the children instances with a new community that aggregates multiple remote communities.
Just thinking out loud, haven’t really fleshed out the idea yet.
That already exists. ATM, the thing you’re confusing it with is that there are 4-5 “gaming” subs, but eventually if one gets big enough or the others get taken in by one this will happen, and it’ll look like this instance “Technology@Beehaw.org” (p.s. I’m accessing this from Sopuli, so not on Beehaw).
I guess its just a natural progression of being absorbed by other communities that are larger.
Yeah, I think I get it - there’s a bunch of smaller gaming@<lemmy-instance> kind of things, you’re talking about a master c/gaming that combines all of the smaller lemmy instances of gaming channels, right?
Yeah, like multireddits!
I don’t think such an aggregator is required. Interoperability is smooth enough that you don’t have to think about different instances most of the time. I’ve only really noticed two points that would be confusing:
- the sign up process
- the “local”/“all” distinction
So I think what we really need to do to make this platform intuitive to people that aren’t already familiar with it is:
- Somehow streamline signing up. The process from googling Lemmy to having an account on an instance should not be confusing or intimidating.
- Filter by “all” by default. The default should cater to the users which are less likely to figure it out themselves. If you don’t understand what instances are and what “local” vs “all” means, then you are probably here for the “all” experience. If you understand and really want “local” you are probably fine having to set it yourself.
The all for default is actually an admin setting (for users not signed up)
for me it was just
reddit --> Lemmy
Unless you count a few random forums when I was a kid, same. You think we’ll age out before whatever war starts?
So many long forgotten relics and old friends lost to time.
bbs, usenet, irc, aol chat rooms, aim/icq/msn messenger (by the way, anyone remember Trillian?), geocities web-rings, various phpBB forums (shoutout neopages), oekaki drawing boards, livejournal, stumbleupon,
IRC thrives! The dusty corners of the internet where people continue to develop the most obscure software functioning as an unknown pillar of the internet still have IRC channels available to discuss and interact.
Still remember my icq number lol.
Same. I logged in to their icq web client recently for shits. Was a trip to see all the old usernames.
Yeah some of those I had forgotten! For me it was usenet, IRC, ICQ, Yahoo Chat Rooms (I was one of the kids that dropped booters and other pesky little bots and hacks into them all the time 😂 - I’m still friends to this day with someone I met via Yahoo Chatrooms though!) Definitely used Trillian, and the old phpBB forums before I found Reddit over 10 years ago…and now Lemmy
Oekaki drawing boards ಥ╭╮ಥ Oh how I miss thee…
I made an irc client in MIRC using MIRC script before it had multi-server capability and thought I was so smart and then a few months later they released the update with it in it. Oh well, it was fun at the time!
There was del.icio.us as well!
Core memory unlocked
I forgot about that site, what did it even do?
It was kind of a social bookmark sharing site, used it a lot back in the day! I saw word of a revival a while back, but like most things the revivals don’t seem to work out. See Digg, Bebo etc. :/
Yea, kinda miss that one =/
Oh and metafilter
Tried the official Reddit app today and boy people weren’t joking when they say it sucks. I thought it’d just be the usual experience plus some ads but I was totally wrong.
The official app doesn’t respect your subreddit subscriptions at all, instead force feeding you feeds of whatever their algorithm thinks will drive maximum engagement just like a shit version of Facebook. The “hot” etc functionality is completely stipped from it entirely.
Guess I’m here to stay on the fediverse now.
What absolutely sucks about this is that I had carefully curated my subscriptions on RIF in order not to exacerbate my dumb mental health issues.
Hell, I’ve read angry posts about people in recovery from addiction and alcohol saying how they keep seeing ads for beer or gambling and things like that.
It’s horrifying!!
people in recovery from addiction and alcohol saying how they keep seeing ads for beer or gambling
Not that this is how it works, but I imagine a diligent algorithm looking at those individuals and that content, and then thinking “mhhmm this will generate maximum revenue!!”.
I think that’s absolutely how it works (in part). Ads curated toward your demographic! Maybe it’s not inherently purposeful, but it’s harmful, nonetheless.
In a subr×ddit about alcohol recovery? “Our algorithm detected that your post history contains the word “alcohol” or “beer” a lot! We will tailor your ads to cater to your interests for maximum profits!” Boom. There you go.
It takes the human aspect out of the community and drives it to become harmful at worst and soulless at best.
Me too. I suffer from PTSD myself so I avoid things like the war coverage in Ukraine. The app is full of it and I can’t filter it fully like I can in RIF.
you don’t mention the copious, copious amounts of ads and sponsored contents
wow thanks reddit, you are more and more Facebook-like now, congratulations.
Same fucking journey as you. Reddit was a good run for 10 years, let’s see if Lemmy can work.
What do we do if it doesn’t? Just crawl back and apologize?
I mean, since there’s no central site to shut down, Lemmy failing would pretty much just mean that it stagnates and some of the bigger instances shut down, at which point there still would be some remnant of it left to stay on, if a smaller one. Failing that, it isn’t the only reddit alternative that people have been working on, so maybe one of the others will be more successful.
Nah. If Lemmy/Fediverse doesn’t work out, there will be others. This has all happened before…
If the fediverse idea doesn’t work out and it’s yet another company the cycle is bound to continue.
A big chance is in front of us to break the cycle!
Oh, I agree wholeheartedly. Decentralization is the way to go and I hope Lemmy succeeds. This particular implementation may or may not work out long term, but the underlying idea is sound.
We’ll get it. Might take a couple tries, but we’ll get it.
I don’t think so. Although many will remain with Reddit, there is no incentive or loyalty for a significant % to do so. If reddit is shit, why not just use FB, Twitter or regular message boards? Already I saw many subreddits have discords already.
The question for most of those users is there a lesser evil in choosing one bad company over another? Unfortunately I just see this community content becoming fragmented as a result and no winners emerging.
I like Lemmy / kbin but I am concerned that a dev could just shutdown their server and a community, accounts are gone. Who pays the server bills, and maintenance backups etc? This seems incredibly problematic.
Beyond that they need a strong mobile app and 3P devs, a tool to read a users reddit profile and subscribe to similar channels, one click registration without selecting a server. It would be good to also have a mechanism for showing cross-platform posted content in a single view.
If honestly feels like the 90s wild west Internet days again. No alternative I have seen so far can address these concerns.
Discord is way too engaging
We make it work!
glares menacingly at Lemmy
Consider exploring other Fediverse platforms before heading back to Reddit.
I’ve been using Mastodon for some time now so the Fediverse won’t lose me, the question is if my redditing can be migrated.
@OneRedFox @amki Yep. There’s #Kbin and #Lotide.
Yeah, I almost did it, skipped digg. Seemed like a poor reddit clone at the time. Was nice to be on the right side, but sad to see it fall away. All for RSS, open source and federation though, so its nice. Reddit could have done the same - when they open sourced and allowed voat to be, they could have had a federated framework then - and allowed individual servers to handle their own APIs. They could have charged a license fee or something to commerical users who put ads on and made profits, but open source wins again I guess!
Gonna be honest it’s kinda weird to me as someone who did just move over that there’s a bunch of posts from people who just found the Fediverse claiming it as home while there’s people who have been here since it’s creation. It’s got the implication that this was created as some sort of next jump from Reddit which doesn’t really seem to be the case from my perspective.
That feeling makes sense, but I think everyone knows that the Fediverse wasn’t created specifically to give them a landing in this event, just like Reddit wasn’t created to catch the Digg refugees, etc. More of a “next phase in the evolution of this concept”, and while it took a catastrophe, they’re ready to consider that it’s time to move on now.
The trick is going to be walking that line between preserving what made the Fediverse great and not alienating the newcomers. I think there’s room for everyone, though, and really the big advantage of the Fediverse - we don’t have to agree to co-exist, and can even co-existing completely separately if needed.
I think you bring up a pretty important point about federation in that it allows for and even encourage expansion in some ways, so that’s a good way to keep optimistic about it. I guess I just feel a little embarrassed. Especially when you look at posts like the recent one asking Lemmy users how they feel about the reddit refugees, and it’s flooded with responses from Reddit refugees instead offering unsolicited feedback about design choices. Then you have threads like this with people laying claim to the fediverse more or less. It just feels like some kind of a Christopher Columbus situation. While I realize that might be a little tone-deaf it’s the best analogy I have for it.
Any community is a sum of it’s members, good bad, or otherwise. I think there will be a wave of us Reddit refugees, but also word is going to spread to other places like Meta and hopefully bring in even more people. Getting people sorted into servers that are going to be able to handle the load, or even better getting them to host their own servers is going to be the way to go. Sorry if we’re stumbling all over your garden in the meantime.
Getting people sorted into servers that are going to be able to handle the load, or even better getting them to host their own servers is going to be the way to go.
That part still worries me a smidge, and it’s somewhat related to my other concern about funding/scaling. As more of the general public discover and move over, the % of the general population willing and able to host their own instance is going to steadily decrease. Not saying that we’re all gonna die or anything, but it’s going to be a shift and we’ll have to continue to adapt.
Hmm. Theoretically you could commercialise an instance, I guess.
I expect that in time, that’s exactly what will happen. Some instance somewhere will offer guaranteed availability and performance for a monthly fee to it’s members. That feels icky at first blush, but why should it? It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but no one is forced to use that instance to be part of the larger community, and one instance can’t hold the community hostage like a single company social media company could. They’ll have success right up until they don’t and the Fediverse will sort it out through migrations of users and communities.
or make a non-profit. archiveofourown have ~20% of reddit’s traffic and run purely on donation.
That might work too, but I feel like it could be tricky to fundraise if there’s 1000 equivalent large-ish instances.
kind of a Christopher Columbus situation. While I realize that might be a little tone-deaf it’s the best analogy I have for it.
I definitely get the sentiment. Everyone is looking for how to make this what they “need” (want) without enough consideration for what it already is and who got it there. It’s going to be a journey, that’s for sure.
I bet some early Redditors felt the same way about the DIgg refugees.
I see what you mean to an extent, and I also just moved over, but it’s worth remembering that Digg -> Reddit was the same afaik. Like Reddit had been around and established for a decent amount of time before the fall of Digg. (This is second-hand info because I wasn’t around at the time)
I’ve been on reddit for a couple years before the flood from Digg. The quality of content and especially comments went down right then, and never recovered.
Personally I skipped Digg entirely.
Depends entirely on the subreddit, in my experience. Places like AskHistorians didn’t even exist when the great Digg exodus occurred. My favorite sub was /r/cfb which also benefited greatly from the mainstream popularity.
Not coincidental that both of these are relatively strongly moderated compared to many of the biggest/default subs.
Yea the digg users made r/funny what it is now
I realise that this is unpopular. But personally while I disagree with the decision to charge (exorbitantly) for the api and appalled at the slander hurled at the dev, I think that is an business choice and one more item that I have to disagree and live with.
But I am very excited about the rise of the fediverse. I know that a company will eventually make a decision that I feel very passionately about, but I will be stuck making a difficult choice. With the fediverse, it provides the users with the opportunity to have control. This power of course often comes with various other costs (lack of a dedicated sre or moderation teams, etc). But I expect that over time this will evolve into options where paid offerings will come up that allows for higher QoS where required.
Honestly, if spez hadn’t already sold the site to white supremacists, I’d be a lot quicker to defend this.
The api changes really were about protecting their gold mine of data from ai data models scraping for data. Reddit wants to use that data to create its own models and then replace moderators with those models. The ultimate goal here is to turn the existing dataset into an automoderator on steroids that they could sell anywhere. Trouble is someone else is going to beat them to it.
There was a reason these changes lined up so nicely with Google doing the same thing. Everyone’s realizing they’ve been spouting their gold from firehoses and they’re being reactionary and turning them off asap instead of just like, accepting it as a facet of having a public social network.
Who are the white supremacists he sold to?
It was the Chinese that he sold out to. Not the white supremacists.
He did what now?
I must’ve missed that part of the story…
It is just the catalyst we need to transcend the status quo and normalize technology that respects its users.
I’m also very optimistic right now. The challenges I see are more around funding, as continued work on the code bases and hosting seem to be the largest hurdles and ultimately easier with money than without. The Fediverse feels like an incredibly natural next step for a lot of users that are coming from a Reddit or Reddit-like background. Everything else (robust collection of communities, moderation, 3rd party tooling, etc) comes with the crowd and from the community, not from the “owner”, and will only take time if we can solve for the funding/scaling challenges.
Digg -> Reddit -> Lemmy
After experiencing the death of two “power to the people” platforms due to profit-driven VC-backed corporate meddling, here’s hoping the third platform is the charm Lemmy & the fediverse.
I think the difference here is that Digg and Reddit were both VC-driven companies that wanted power, and the fediverse is fundamentally different.
I was on reddit before digg, but left reddit for digg until diggv4, then I went back to reddit lol. The decentralized nature of Lemmy and the fediverse seems like it will be more resistant to that sort of bullshit though.
At the expense, or maybe also benefit, of slower growth and some level of unavoidable fragmentation.
If you still have a Reddit account, unsub all the subreddits that are refusing to participate in a strike.
Fucking scabs
Good idea! Apparently most of my subs participated, so I only had to unsub a few times. Eerie view to see an empty front page after I was done, never had that.
Apart from this short visit, I stay away from reddit.
I’m kinda proud all the communities I follow followed suit! Even some pretty small/niche ones.
Damned good idea. I deleted all my posts and comments but also removing subs is good too.
What would that do? Not like they can pay the mods any less lol
Decrease soft power those subreddits have due to popularity/subscriber count.
Renegade BBSes -> IRC -> slashdot -> digg -> reddit -> imgur -> discord -> mastadon
with plenty of side quests along the wayPre search engine time on Geocities trading mutual linking on each other websites, reams and reams of messages and emails
So we’re a side quest then?
It’s hard to tell… it doesn’t feel like one, but it remains to be seen.
But I feel like the other alternatives to Reddit and the fediverse are more of a sidequest at this point.
fixed, it was late 😉
