[Meta] Announcing realtesla@lemmy.world

Posted: https://old.reddit.com/r/RealTesla/comments/14n7fhp/meta_announcing_realteslalemmyworld/

With the #RedditBlackout June event and /r/RealTesla opening back up, I think the community needs a meta-discussion. I’ll make the first move with this post on Lemmy.world.

First and foremost: if a user wishes to choose the default option of staying on Reddit… that’s fine. This is likely the default choice for many posters and commenters and you’ll get no qualms from me if this is your decision. Alas, a subset of the community will need to think of migration options. Some of us simply do not find Reddit Administrator’s stance compatible with our morals and are seeking new internet homes.

I hope that this guide will open the discussion of migration (to where? Pros/cons?). I’ve mostly played with Lemmy during the #RedditBlackout, so I’ll be sharing my experiences here. I also have heard whispers of other options, that I’ll briefly cover at the bottom of this post.

I have to imagine that people out there are on the fence about these migration options. I’m here to answer your questions, based on my experience with Lemmy. Both the goods, and the bads.

[email protected]

https://lemmy.world/c/realtesla – This is where I, Dragontamer5788, have experimented with Lemmy for the past few weeks during #RedditBlackout. As a “Fediverse” community, it is accessible from many, many different servers:

https://lemmy.world is the “home” server of !realtesla, while there are “Federation” pacts with many other servers to smoothly allow the discussion (posts, comments, upvotes, moderator actions, etc. etc.) and keep the states all in sync.

The Fediverse’s goal is to provide a social media replacement in general. And the Lemmy and kbin sub-communities of the Fediverse are trying to replicate a Reddit-like discussion environment.

Federation adds a little bit of new complexity due to the different-servers. See next section for more details on that.

Musings on the Choice of Home Server

Users, and communities, should pick a home server which has a reasonable and trustworthy administrator. The good news is that most administrators are reasonable people in the Lemmy-verse. So you can mostly just pick at random and… probably… be fine.

sh.itjust.works, lemmy.ca, lemmy.world are all fine picks. https://kbin.social deserves special mention: its part of kbin project, not Lemmy, but they seek some degree of compatibility, and https://kbin.social /m/[email protected] works. I don’t know how many bugs that federation has however, but it could be an option if kbin looks better to you!

I picked https://lemmy.world as !realtesla’s home because I was just following the #RedditBlackout crowds to this server. Upon my last few weeks of experimentation, I’ve discovered Lemmy.world has become the frontrunner due to open-registration policy, and trust in @Rudd, the main administrator. @Rudd has successfully run the mastodon.world server through the Twitter Migration last year and still runs Mastodon.world today. Politically I’d describe everyone here as moderate-left.

https://beehaw.org is a left hangout spot that is expected to refederate with https://lemmy.world eventually. Beehaw.org’s closed community style means that only the administrators can create communities (aka: subreddits), making Beehaw.org the most curated of all sites in Lemmy. You will be cut off from https://lemmy.world/c/realtesla for the near future however, but the highly-curated high-quality communities (albeit left-leaning) are clearly an advantage and I suggest you to check them out too, despite the fact that they can’t access https://lemmy.world/c/realtesla . Long term hopes is that automated moderation tools of lemmy improve enough to give this small team of admins/moderators the ability to open back up to a big instance like lemmy.world.

https://sh.itjust.works seems to lean more right / libertarian than other servers. They also seem to be defederating from lemmygrad (aka: tankie-communists) and exploding-heads (aka: right-wing trolls), so their administrators seem to have a good grasp on decision making. I feel like a number of /r/RealTesla commenters would be more comfortable here, rather than the left-leaning other instances.

https://programming.dev is perhaps the largest programming-specific instance on Lemmy so far. There are other boutique servers, such as https://mtgzone.com, https://dormi.zone, and https://startrek.website, which have grabbed a large number of users and have successfully migrated to their own server-specific community.

https://lemmy.ca is a Canadian specific server. Today there seems to be glitches in the federation between lemmy.ca and lemmy.world however, but hopefully the administrators figure out the issue! I bring this one up to note that even when “Federated”, software bugs can prevent posts, comments, and upvotes from traversing between servers, so picking your “home server” has a degree of importance… especially during bug-fixing times.

Not everything is pleasant. exploding-heads.com just caused an upstir as they’ve proven themselves to be administrated by far-right wing trolls, and have been defederated from https://lemmy.world. Also on my RADAR is lemmygrad.ml, a far-left communist tankie server. They seem to mostly keep to themselves and aren’t invoking troll campaigns, but there’s a number of instances that have already chosen to defederate from them purely on political grounds. (https://lemmy.world has kept this connection up).

I see defederation as a new tool in the toolbelt for administrators, where an entire server can ban all the users from another server en-masse if those users cross the line. Defederation therefore makes me optimistic: seeing the new possibilities available to handle online trolls and help moderate the discussion, and help build the communities we want. I recognize its not for everyone, but I’m overall optimistic for this environment and want to participate.

Bugs and issues

Lemmy is… not the best written software yet. It reminds me of 2008-era Reddit that’s constantly falling over itself as more-and-more users join (Digg migration event anyone?). https://lemmy.world in particular is the largest Lemmy today, and we’re seeing bugs here that don’t exist on other servers.

Federation bugs – Lemmy.world requires thousands of background threads/workers to sync posts to-and-from other servers, due to its large size. If you use https://lemmy.world /c/[email protected] (ie: the Lemmy.world portal to [email protected]), your posts, upvotes, and comments could be delayed. In some cases, bugs with https://lemmy.ca has trapped my posts for days of delay. I’ve notified the administrators of this problem, hopefully they’ll figure out the issue.
Lemmy UI bugs – Error-handling is poor. If you sign up for a new username and the email fails for whatever reason, spinning-circle forever. If you have a password that’s too long, spinning-circle forever. If the topic is too big, spinning-circle forever. If the community is too big, spinning-circle forever (but your post/comments go through). Lemmy was in an alpha/beta state and isn’t quite ready for the #RedditBlackout. But if you are familiar with the bugs, you’re more or less able to talk to the home-server just fine.
Lemmyisms – Pulling in a remote community is a manual job invoked by the search menu (!!!). This means that if you can’t see a community you know exists, you need to invoke a dance with the search-bar to get the https://lemmy.world server to federate to that community. I haven’t figured out the full details myself. But this, in combination with #1 bugs and #2 bugs makes for a frustrating experience.

A number of these bugs were trying to be fixed in .18, a new version of Lemmy aimed for deployment for the July 1st rush. I… don’t think .18 will make it to Lemmy.world in time for the July rush though, so we’ll just have to live with these bugs.

How to Sign Up for Lemmy.world

This needs a guide because of how many bugs there are in Lemmy.

Do not use an underscore in your username. If you do, the signup GUI glitches out and “spins forever”.
Do not use a password longer than 20 characters. If you do, the signup GUI glitches out and “spins forever”.
Pray and hope the verification email gets delivered. If the process of emailing fails, the signup GUI glitches out and “spins forever”.
If the verification email gets partially delivered, the GUI will succeed, but you’ll have “spins forever” problems when you try to post. If you have any issues, contact me and I’ll try to relay a message to https://lemmy.world administrators to fix your account.

Other Migration Options

kbin, especially the https://kbin.social server, is another popular option. It is mostly compatible with lemmy (and indeed: https://kbin.social /m/[email protected] proves that they can access realtesla discussion). The main issue is that kbin’s frontend is entirely different, links written in “Lemmy-style” will not work on kbin.social’s UI.

There’s specialized communities: such as https://squabbles.io, https://lobste.rs, and https://tildes.net/. Unlike Reddit, these sites are aiming at smaller growth, so its more difficult to sign up for these communities. Like https://beehaw.org, without the hopes of future federation, they have strong moderator teams and seem to have built a good community.