I saw Jerboa while scrolling through random apps to potentially install, and became excited that finally there’s a REDDIT alternative as well, instead of just Twitter. Mastodon might be nice, but I don’t use Twitter, and I probably won’t use Mastodon, either. Reddit, on the other hand, oh man…
Reddit is honestly so important to the internet at this point that you’re trolling if you do web searches without “reddit” appended at the end (be it technological, physiological, historical, political, or any other type of topic that you’re looking for information or opinions about).
However… Reddit is going towards a terrible corporate direction, and something like Lemmy has been desperately needed for a while now, and I hope it can eventually somehow become the new “reddit” at the end of web searches eventually, as nobody knows what could happen to Reddit soon…
I find the most random, but also INCREDIBLY important and crucial bits of information deep within Reddit thread replies, since each one can go anywhere, no matter what the original post was about, such as finding out that fabric softeners are damaging for everything, especially humans, and that they should just generally not be used… on a gaming-related subreddit. Of course I start doing my research afterwards as well, now specifically regarding what I just learned to make sure and verify I know the correct information from multiple sources, but even just that initial random warning is great to start off with.
And the worst part? We might lose ALL of these things since we’re at the mercy of Reddit’s shareholders (even more so in the future, most likely), and these incredible resources and HUMAN EXPERIENCES that one shares, and MANY others learn from, could just… disappear…
A quick major policy change, and goodbye Reddit…
I’m looking forward to Lemmy taking off!
This is the reason the fediverse is so damn important. Companies and oeople are totally misalligned. The goal of a company at the end of the day is to make money at any cost. Online that places them in a situation where they collect users and try to build a wall arounf them. Eventually they all fail and people batter down the walls from within to escape. Compuserve, yahoo, myspace, facebook, etc are all examples.
Yup, corporations hire psychologists, analysts, statisticians, and more in order to create a walled garden and keep users engaged with their service or platform for as long as possible (see the addictive Instagram browsing UX loop, for example).
It’s pretty evil just how far they’re willing to go to drive a profit…
I’m new to the Fediverse, but I’m looking forward to its future!
@[email protected] and I are the main devs for lemmy, but we’re pretty bad about telling ppl about it… probably the reason we’ve had slow but steady growth, except for moments like these. It’s a huge help if ppl can tell others about it, so we can spend more time coding.
Glad to have you aboard!
Oh wow, it’s an honor to meet you - thank you so much for your hard work!
I had already started talking about Lemmy to people as soon as I heard about it myself, and I’ve seen many discussions about it in the most random comment sections on Reddit continuously popping up within the past day or two, so it’s definitely starting to receive more and more attention!
I’m super excited too!
My main fear, is that people will just accept reddit’s APIs going down, and go back to reddit anyway. It happened with twitter: a lot of the people who wanted to migrate to mastodon, left after a few days and went back to twitter, even with all of the shitstorms it has.
If reddit is to be believed, I think >80% of their users use the official web app and mobile app. That’s shocking considering how bad both are, and shows that a lot of people just accept it because that’s where the users are.
Yeah, honestly, that’s what the majority of everything does. An insane amount of people freely download malicious apps without any further research or anything, let alone know about open source being a thing.
However, I think certain communities, such as SelfHosted or DataHoarder, would start gradually using Lemmy more due to the nature of their knowledge and awareness about things, which might slowly bring over more people.
I’ve also seen Lemmy mentioned in a lot of threads about the subreddits shutting down in cooperation as a protest against the Reddit API change. Most are casual users and won’t care, and that’s unfortunate, but if more and more start spreading awareness and migrating, maybe there’ll be a better chance of more of those 80%+ coming here…
Yeah, it is pretty sad what happened to Reddit. Aaron Swartz would be disappointed.
I think it is cool that content is replicated among the Lemmy instances so that if a server goes down the content is still available on other servers that fetched the content before.
Exactly! It’s a real shame when a subreddit with lots of content, history, and human socialization and activity just gets taken down, and it just becomes… gone.
Also Rest In Peace Aaron Hillel Swartz, you were done wrong, and you improved the world with your existence and intentions!
Reddit was my main content aggregator. I’ve had a Diaspora account for ages (I left FB years ago) but hadn’t gotten into the other #fediverse flavors outside of it. With Reddit gone from my life now, too, I’ve found that having a set of mastadon column feeds, a Diaspora stream, and now a Lemmy feed as well (alongside Hacker News and Phys.org) I think I’ve got enough standard content aggregation happening without it. Unfortunately that means my pinned tabs count is high (for me anyway), but oh well
this might be a dumb question, but does Diaspora work well if you don’t convince a bunch of “real world” friends to join it as well? It doesn’t strike me as a place to follow strangers for example, but Mastodon (microblogging in general) and Lemmy seem more acceptable in that regard.
It works well when you have a lot of tags your following. Like a lot. Here’s an incomplete showing of all of my tags. When I switched, I didn’t have enough to generate enough turnover on my stream, so I relied mostly on other aggregators until I’d built up enough.
Thanks! I should give it a chance. It doesn’t seem dissimilar to a microblog, so my needs may already be met by Akkoma in that regard.
I used diaspora for years and years but at some point I gave up on it, maybe I should give it a go again. Anyway, I found that following interesting accounts was a lot more effective than following tags. Check out the public feed every so often, anyone who posts something fun or interesting, follow.
I see that I am not the only one with plethora of pinned tabs to fediverse and otherwise FOSS platforms for content aggregation. But if you were trying to find any proprietary centralized platforms for this, you would come out empty-handed.
I’m hoping not that lemmy goes necessarily mainstream, I don’t think that is good for a small platform. However, I am hoping that it develops a smaller but dedicated database ala tumblr.
The thing is, lemmy isn’t really a platform in the same sense that Reddit is. It’s more of a platform in the sense that the Apache web server is.
You can choose which other sites you federated with, so multiple content networks can run on the same software. We can have as many big or small Lemmy networks as we want.
My worry is that Lemmy will one day be big enough to be targeted by astroturfing campaigns. There’s already a market for buying and selling reddit accounts so they can be turned into bots to advertise, or to push or control a narrative.
Reddit itself can most likely detect when this happens (whether or not they want to do anything about it is another story). But how would Lemmy, with it’s decentralized architecture, be able to defend against or even detect such an attack?
This definitely does not have a clear and easy solution. It will be a lot of work if we ever come close to it. The good thing is that there are always options to defederate an instance full of bots and ban the bot account on your own instances.
I hate wandering onto the bigger subreddits because it’s often impossible to distinguish what’s genuine and what’s not and my default is to just take everything at face value.
