I was just reading this post https://old.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1gmv76n/is_reddit_going_to_remain_the_primary_space_for/ and many barely see the fediverse as an alternative and they seem to have a negative bias towards it. Super ironic when it comes to the self-hosting community. Yes, some instances are problematic, yes, some devs might have had problematic views. But it doesn’t really matter when it’s federated and FOSS. I think it’s clear-cut that the selfhosting community on Lemmy is a perfect alternative to reddit. Why is there such a negative bias?
Because people off Reddit hate everything that its not reddit
People on Reddit. We’re the people off Reddit :)
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Us vs them too. It’s different, people hate change. So now there is a them and an us…
Devs are allegedly Marxist-Leninists.
Redditors dont understand that devs dont exactly have full control of open source software, that different instances are not operated by the devs.
Edit: Lemmy devs to be specific
Yep, though the alternatives are not quite there yet software wise, but MBin and Piefed aren’t that far behind…
I’m on a pretty old version of mbin (I have some modifications I made for federation issues back when it was kbin). I need to spend a weekend to pilot an upgrade and make sure I can run it safely live.
But even then it’s better in some ways already and I never feel like I’m missing something from lemmy. But I think just calling the whole thing lemmy puts off people that are seeing things through a political lens.
yep. as an mbin cheerleader, i evaluated both and kbin was better looking and perfectly functional from the start. no app required. no custom user-land css.
but what really bothers me is the conflation of lemmy and fediverse. theyre used almost interchangeably. other platforms get lost in the discussion.
Mbin isn’t
Alledgedly?
Marxist Leninst is a nice way to put it, they support Putin, Xi. Zhedong and Stalin.
Thankfully as you say, it’s FOSS with free federation and defederation. Admins only have control over lemmy.ml.
I don’t get the hate against the lemmy devs tbh, they have their (perhaps controversial) political views but they leave everyone that’s not on their site alone and it feels like they develop lemmy pretty impartially
sure they might ban you off ml but that’s their site and they get to do whatever they want with it, just like every other instance
i mean network effect is a thing i guess but that’s not as important on lemmy where there are usually similarly large communities about generic things on most major instances
Exactly … it’s also a double standard because reddit is basically a capitalist model of the same digital system but no one ever complains or criticizes it.
The socialist digital creators built something and shared it freely with everyone and also don’t exert control over anyone.
The capitalist digital creatures built something and locked it up, monetized it and are using the user’s efforts as the basis for the business only the owners make money on and have complete control over everything.
It’s amazing because it’s a fantastic metaphor for the two platforms.
Calling them “socialist digital creators” is misleading at best, if not an outright insult to socialism.
They are marxists-leninists who whitewash the crimes committed by the USSR and CCP. They support the genocidal invasion by Russia, a country that is neither socialist or democratic; it’s an authoritarian capitalist oligarchy.
There is no double standard. You don’t see the CTO of reddit running a subreddit dedicated to whitewashing the Pinochet regime and/or western colonialism in Africa or Asia.
Reddit is run by sketchy and corrupt individuals, it is possible that in a just world we would even call them criminals. Lemmy’s marxists-leninists are openly supportive of genocidal actions and brutal authoritarian leadership. There is no comparison.
Could provide a link to a comment or a quote where the devs whitewash the crimes or support genocides?
My man, the head developer of lemmy is the admin of lemmygrad. He has a fucking Mao picture in his profile!
Don’t even try to weasel your way around this. This is not going to work with me.
I hate these people. Pathetic larpers living in democratic countries while supporting authoritarianism and genocide. And when I say hate, I don’t mean it in the internet slang way (“hater”).
How should I put this without breaking any rules? I genuinely wish they meet the same fate as “Donbas Cowboy”, Russell Bentley:
Bentley, 64, was a fixture in the low-level Russian incursion in Ukraine dating back to 2014. Calling himself the Donbas Cowboy, Bentley became a popular figure on Russian propaganda networks for his criticism of the U.S. government.
Bentley’s wife, Lyudmila, then claimed that Russian soldiers from a tank battalion abducted him.
According to the Investigative Committee, Vansyatsky, Agaltsev, and Iordanov tortured Bentley on April 8, and he died shortly afterward.
Vansyatsky and Agaltsev are suspected of blowing up a car with Bentley’s body in it and ordering Bazhin to get rid of what was left of his remains.
My man, the head developer of lemmy is the admin of lemmygrad
No, he is not. Check admins section on lemmygrad.ml, which profile do you think belongs to dessalines? He is only admin of lemmy.ml.
He has a fucking Mao picture in his profile!
It’s a controversial figure, but it doesn’t mean that the dev supports crimes or genocides.
How should I put this without breaking any rules? …
You judge people who support genocide, I get it and I here with you. But wishing death upon others because of their opinions? That’s just hypocrisy.
No, he is not. Check admins section on lemmygrad.ml, which profile do you think belongs to dessalines? He is only admin of lemmy.ml.
Are you sure about that? Why does this page state that:
Lemmygrad was created by dessalines and Farmer Heck.[a] It has over 34,000 posts and over 360 active users.[2]
With a further clarification that Muad’Dibber (who is currently an admin) is dessalines
Currently known as Muad’Dibber and Black Tulip, respectively, on Lemmygrad.’
Is Muad’Dibber not dessalines?
It’s a controversial figure, but it doesn’t mean that the dev supports crimes or genocides.
Controversial figure? Mao was a brutal dictator that directly caused an inordinate amount of deaths and suffering. He is no better than Stalin, Pinochet, Hitler or Pol Pot.
Since he runs lemmygrad, he most definitely supports the genocide of Ukrainians in the occupied territories. Before you start acting out, I’d like to see you and your family try and speak Ukrainian in the occupied and try and publicly oppose russian occupaiton. I think the example I provided with the “Donbas Cowboy”, Russell Bentley, should give you an idea of what life is like there.
And then there is also their support for the genocide of Uighurs in Xinjiang.
For you this is just random internet drama. I am not going to tolerate any degenerate LARPer shilling for russia and the CCP.
You judge people who support genocide, I get it and I here with you. But wishing death upon others because of their opinions? That’s just hypocrisy.
These are not mere opinions. These scoundrels wish me, my family and my fellow citizens harm in the most pathetic way possible; by LARPing online as marxist-leninists. It is reasonable to want them to end up like “Donbas Cowboy”, Russell Bentley. This a just and fair end for Western LARPers who whitewash genocide.
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Seems to me most people in that thread seems relatively open minded? The people dismissing Lemmy completely appears to be downvoted, and people seem to have a nuanced understanding that it’s a better platform in theory but sadly less active.
I’m sure they’re right. I’m a slow person who thinks there’s plenty of activity over here, but if you’re used to the adrenaline of Reddit it must feel a little small town-y.
To be honest except on things like sports and politics, reddit kind of feels like a ghosttown too. So many posts with huge amounts of upvotes and like 2 bot generated comments. The power commenter types seem to have left after the exodus and been replaced by lots of people who scroll and like but don’t really venture much into comments.
I was just thinking about this because I’ve been going through and blocking every political community. I’ve found that when that is gone, there’s really not that much left aside from random technology focused stuff, some memes, asinine twitter screenshots, and a fuck ton of linux stuff. And the comments sections of seemingly unrelated posts often devolve into political shit slinging. I’m on an instance that blocks lemmygrad and hexbear so I can imagine it’s far worse for the ones that don’t. I’m starting to sour on lemmy too because there’s basically nothing here of interest to me anymore.
Well said. I’m feeling this way too.
Confirmed that the ones that don’t block hexbear and lemmygrad.ml are significantly worse:-).
I like !lemmybewholesome@lemmy.world, but there’s less than a post a day to it. At some point it’s up to us to build what we want to see in the world, which is harder when there are fewer of us - so if becomes a cache-22 where we need more people to make new content but we would need more content to attract new people.
And apparently mod tools here are inadequate, though hopefully improving.
Doesn’t !selfhosted@lemmy.world have like 40k subscribers? Top ten Lemmy community by sub count, iirc.
Bingbingbing!
The people still exclusively on Reddit are on Reddit because they don’t like the Fediverse or they’re unwilling to change their habits. Had they liked it and been genuinely open for change they would have made the switch, or at least used both platforms.
This is not so much true for the average user, as they might not be aware of the federated alternatives at all, or they might think it sounds too hard. But it’s absolutely true for the self-hosting community.
As someone who used to be vehemently anti-lemmy, it’s a few different reasons.
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It’s something new. Honestly is as simple as that. Most redditors are straight up threatened by new features, new looks, new anything. New Reddit is an example of that. To be fair it is hideous but it’s also drastically underused according to reddits own metrics. This just stays consistently with everything. People prefer old subs to new, prefer old users to new, old memes to new. Why? Dunno. Could be as simple as just that they know it so it’s comforting.
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The propaganda that reddit put up against Lemmy was pretty insane. The first few mini-migrations set people up with weird expectations and a lot of them bounced back to reddit with weird notions. Some of it was based on shitty admins or shitty servers (cough lemmy.ml cough) but other things seemed to be almost coordinated against Lemmy. By the time that the big migration from Reddit killing off third party apps/API use a lot of people had heard one or two things and just started spreading it. Redditors often don’t source material and just kinda spread rumors or ‘feelings’ or upvote one idiot who seems like he knows what he’s talking about while blatantly lying. This has never gone away. The same idiots keep whining and being dismissive.
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Redditors are hateful. Not purely hateful people or anything but the atmosphere encourages hate and division. I still browse reddit occasionally and I’ll check the comments out about a post. It’s always so bitter and angry, snapping out at one another. When every crab in the bucket is pulling you down, you get stuck in that habit too. Until you break free of reddit you don’t realize just how bitter it’s making you. Lemmy doesn’t have those vibes and it can be really off putting to someone still in that bitterness. Kindness and people getting along almost comes off as stupid and naive so you just kinda dismiss the entirety of Lemmy as a whole.
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This is a conspiracy but I’m positive that Reddit admins are purging a lot of references to Lemmy that don’t show the site in a positive light. When the API shit was happening people kept pointing out that certain communities that were supportive of Lemmy suddenly got locked behind a NSFW curtain that forced users to be logged in to read the community. A lot of people talked about how certain posts and stuff were being removed, especially ones critical of Spez. I don’t think they stopped that campaign and I think they still try to demonize the hell out of Lemmy. Could be because China has a significant hand in reddit now or it could be because Spez has a tiny dick and a tinier ego. Dunno. But I think they’re weighting the scales.
- […] certain communities that were supportive of Lemmy suddenly got locked behind a NSFW curtain […]
You got that wrong. That was a measure taken by these communities to demonetize reddit. Reddit doesn’t put ads on NSFW subs. Any profile that posts on an NSFW sub also gets their profile switched to NSFW afaik. Moderators got banned for these NSFW tags.
r/PixelDungeon is the only sub that I’m aware of that completely moved to lemmy. Withe the main mod and developer of the most popular fork moving to lemmy. The sub is still open, but it has a “bookmark” called “Lemmy” and a “link” called “Lemmy Community” that directly links to the lemmy community. The sub is still open and automod responded to any new post that the sub moved to lemmy … at least for a year or so, it doesn’t post that any more.
And there are some obvious down sides. To my knowledge lemmy has not implemented flairs or post tags, which get used excessively by some communities to categories and sort their content. !pixeldungeon@lemmy.world fell back to putting text tags into titles like “[DEV]” and “[OC]” and then use the search for this. But that is merely a work around. The sidebar links to these searches, but since instance-relative links are not a thing they are fixed links to lemmy.world.
The search itself is still inconvenient, because you can just “search this community”. You always have to explicitly select a community to search it and have to enter the search term before selecting the community. Edit: that’s of course only true for the front-end (lemmy-ui) I use, dunno if all have that issue
I doubt regular end users will ever get warm with distributed federative networks. A lot of people already seem struggle with email. All tend to flock to a few big instances. For lemmy you also need some basic awareness of these systems. You can’t find everything and to expect that will always go wrong since you only search what your instance knows and never for everything. There are great projects like lemmyverse, but you need to know about them. People who don’t know about them will either just not find the communities they are looking for or they’ll start duplicate communities. The problem of not finding something is smaller on big instances but also more fatal, because their duplicate communities will displace the ones that were started on smaller instances but did not federate well yet.
And everything, the development and hosting, is solely carried on the shoulders of a few volunteers. That will always result in instances popping up and disappearing over time, with development speed varying depending on interest and free time the developers have.
The biggest selling point is not to replace reddit but to be connected with the rest of the activitypub fediverse. That you can see peertube channels as communities here. That mastodon users can comment on lemmy posts eggcetera
No, I do not have it wrong.
There was a protest to mark things NSFW, correct, but what I’m talking about was something else. Kbin and Lemmy communities were marked in such a way that it was impossible to look at unless logged in. While logged in it wasn’t marked as NSFW. It also wasn’t a choice of the subreddit moderators. They were blocked by reddit admin themselves to force people to be logged in to see information on how to transfer to Lemmy.
Reddit 100% was censoring and shadow banning any kbin or lemmy mentions.
I wouldn’t even be surprised if reddit actively promoted or even creates negative comments. There was a precedent of people abandoning Digg so they were clearly very aware and afraid.
At the end of the day it’s impossible to tell with these incredibly opaque networks. It’s even hard to confirm comment visibility as Reddit employs data fudging and shadow banning.
Just another reminder that nothing any closed source social media says should be trusted, ever.
Out of curiosity, what made you change your mind and give it a chance? Any breaking point on Reddit’s side, or just boredom or a sense of adventure?
In regular migration studies there’s always talk of puah and pull factores; reasons for wanting to leave where you are, and reasons for wanting to go to the destination. While I personally like it here, I guess we are currently depending more on push factors than pull factors to attract people from Reddit.
Star Trek.
It’s not even remotely a surprise to anyone that I’m a dedicated Trekkie and have been for quite some time. Also not much of a surprise to those aware of the Trek fandom that sometimes it can be kinda bitter towards shows that don’t fit a certain trend. I happened to like one of those shows and was looking for a place to talk where it wasn’t just constantly being bitched about. I was just googling around and found Startrek.website so I set up an account on lemmy.world to watch stuff over there for a couple months before eventually joining that instance. My original account still exists on lemmy.world and it’s fairly early in the run of a lot of things. I’ve also gotten a few messages to that account simply because it’s a single first name that other people wanted.
Anyway I started posting Trek memes to Risa and it went overboard. Before I realized people were making memes about me and I just sort of stuck around. Startrek.website showed it’s administrators to be flagrantly abusive of not only their power but also of just people so I set up Stamets on this instance. Rest is history.
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Main reason is people are too lazy to change their ways and don’t want to feel like they’ve been making the wrong choice all along.
Yes, some instances are problematic, yes, some devs might have had problematic views.
I mean that’s basically the crux of it. That, and some moderation drama, and the software being very buggy a year ago giving people a bad first impression, and Lemmy still being susceptible to spam.
It’ll take some time before Lemmy (and the Threadiverse as a whole) improves its reputation and moves on from the “it’s a tankie website” take. That said, a lot of people in that thread are making the case for Lemmy, so it’s mostly just people worried it’s not as popular.
The instance I first chose straight up disappeared, so yeah. It wasn’t an easy migration.
In contrast to reddit, whos leadership never made any controversial decisions. /s
The last 2 reddit userbase diasporas were wildly more different than all of the previous ones combined.
When voat became a thing everyone already knew ahead of time that it’s ranks would be filled with facists; but it took a while for lemmy to earn its tankie stereotype and I’m also glad that lemmy’s design helps ensure that it’ll have more stamina that voat or any of the other reddit user digital refugee camp platforms that came before it.
I definitely avoided Lemmy the first go-round with the API fuckery because it seemed from the outside like basically just a tankie protest Reddit in a similar way to how Voat was just a neo-Nazi protest Reddit. To the Lemmy devs’ absolute credit, they don’t push new users toward any of those, though.
I thought one day after having had a Mastodon for some time that I might not have given Lemmy a fair shake, so I went back and ended up finding that most instances are basically normal Reddit fare but honestly less shitty than Reddit proper (there’s a trade-off that posts are less frequent and that small, niche communities can attract unwanted attention by having their posts almost immediately show up in ‘all’).
Yup, things have definitely improved, especially with more extremist instances like lemmygrad being defederated and phased out. I do also want to give a shoutout to the devs for not pushing their stance and letting the platform grow naturally.
Just gonna put this out there. The devs push their stance plenty. Within their scope to do it from their echo chamber. Other than stopping development there’s little they could currently do to impact growth in any way. And there have been issues with their development focus that have negatively impacted growth. Recalcitrance to focus much on moderation tools for instance. As well as at least reported issues difficulty contributing to the project by others. Though that at least is hearsay.
I think it helps to think of it this way: WE are using THEIR platform.
They don’t need mod tools that work for communities and users located on a different instance as much as say Lemmy.World since the devs/admins simply use the instance-wide ban hammer for their own space. Hence that is not their focus. You can go to the trouble to learn Rust, and then fight with them to get your modifications accepted or…
Actually, I need to modify my statement above: YOU are using THEIR platform, but for those of us on Mbin, PieFed (which I’m on right now, and two new instances just opened up including one now in the USA), and soon Sublinks will come too (January was at some point a target iirc?), we have already moved on. None have reached feature parity yet tbh, though even so there are a lot of features that exist that Lemmy itself lacks, so there’s that, and being written in common languages should help enormously with them catching up.
So whether these are “as good as Reddit”, well, beauty is in the mind of the beholder. It’s not a clear win either way, but they are getting closer to being comparable.
Evan Prodromou and the Social Web Working Group (SocialWG) of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) are the creators of ActivityPub
Not desalines or any ML controlled group. All they did was create a Reddit like interface to the platform. After being driven from Reddit for their intolerance.
I sometimes post from Mastodon to servers running this and other software. In fact the reason I’m on world. Is specifically due to its relation to mastodon.social. one of the bigger Mastodon instances I use. It’s got nothing to do with a software. If Rud and the other admins decided tomorrow to migrate the database to a different backend. I don’t think there would be much outrage or many people would care. In fact I’m certainly probably will in the future. As soon as a back end is available that provides significantly better Community / magazine moderating tools. Since I will significantly whiten the load on server administrators. Since things can be done at the community level instead of at the server all the time.
Fair point about the ActivityPub protocol being an entirely different set of developers yet still the “Lemmy” software that you are currently using - both the backend Lemmy implementation of ActivityPub and also the web UI (unless you are using an alternate approach via an app, in which case that brings up a third in the API for Lemmy) - owes its ownership entirely to the same team that also administers the Lemmy.ML instance.
Yes, some instances are problematic, yes, some devs might have had problematic views
And the above quote I presumed to refer to lemmy.ml (and others like lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net; though that is only the beginning of what some people might consider “problematic” e.g. beehaw has defederated from lemmy.world, and the midwest.social admin has been caught banning people merely for downvoting their comment), since I recalled several discussions on Reddit (before the Rexodus) about the “problematic devs” which referred to the “tankie admins” on lemmy.ml (and worse yet lemmygrad.ml). Ofc there were other issues with other instances such as exploding-heads, but that would not seem to intersect at all with the “devs”.
But yeah there could be problematic Mbin instances too? Though I don’t recall ever hearing any discussions of those.
And similarly with PieFed, or Sublinks.
Speaking of, several places have announced wanting to switch from Lemmy to Sublinks when it becomes available, due to the back-end compatibility that is expected to have, when/if-ever it is released (January was some kind of a target date at some point iirc?). That includes Tesseract on dubvee.org, beehaw, and even Lemmy.World.
In the meantime, I have not heard any updates about Sublinks for almost half a year now, though PieFed is entirely functional today - e.g. I am speaking to you from it now. Though it’s not terribly polished, e.g. I can no longer see your user- or instance name due to the way that comment replies are handled, nor any of the background context except your last reply to me and the OP, and quite often upvotes do not show in the proper color so I end up hitting it multiple times (upvote, oops the number went down, I must have already done it previously even though it wasn’t showing in the green indicator color, so hit upvote again, then repeat the next time again, and/or with other comments as well). Though it has some REALLY nice moderation enhancement abilities - caveat: I am not a mod so haven’t seen the actual tools, or even know if such exist. Nonetheless it is exciting to see those developments that have happened already:-).
You can go to the trouble to learn Rust, and then fight with them to get your modifications accepted or…
Can you actually point to any instances of the devs dragging their feet on accepting changes or is this just conjecture? I’ve contributed to Lemmy, and plan to do so in future, and my experience is that they’re fairly accepting of changes.
I don’t know Rust or much about the Lemmy codebase. Possibly people were simply complaining about a time delay - a large part of that being understandable due to the nature of how Federation works, i.e. you don’t want to cause corruption even among servers running older versions of the software.
soon Sublinks will come too (January was at some point a target iirc?)
I wouldn’t hold my breath. I keep an eye on the project Matrix, it’s pretty quiet.
Piefed is much more promising.
Thanks for the additional insight:-).
The PieFed devs indeed seem very responsive, and I have great hopes for it too.
Though I don’t know if e.g. Lemmy.World would consider switching to use it as they were hoping to do with Sublinks. For it providing a “social media platform” it is coming along nicely even if currently lacking polish, though from the perspective of migration of existing content into… well perhaps that’s doable as well but I definitely know far less about that:-).
Threadiverse
Fediverse
Threadiverse refers specifically to the subset of the Fediverse with threaded conversations, like Lemmy and Mbin.
Sounds too much like Threads, the invasive corporate thing which can get fucked. Never going to market for them.
that is a personal problem, not a general protocol based one.
It is a marketing problem.
i agree. bending over for people butthurt about meta seems like a great way to limit your market artificially.
then again, i named my public instance moist
don’t let them change the meaning of our words then
Even if it’s not as popular, I’d say the community might still be more solid in some cases. And that people are more responsive, especially with quality answers. I’ve noticed you’re chastised way more on reddit if you ask a “stupid” question.
The feel of Lemmy communities is a little different than Reddit, even if the software features are mostly analogous and there are many Redditisms used.
Your average commentor/poster will stand out more in a small community, there’s less of being able to post and then slink away.
People have gotten used to a lot more comforting features of modern Reddit, Lemmy in both the users and in the software has more of a “Reddit 10-15 years ago” feel to it.
mbin is a bit less hostile (native reddit) looking than lemmy
I can conjecture some things, though I can’t be 100% sure on either:
First, maybe it’s fanatics/fanboys that don’t like competition making their platform less relevant. Second, it’s paid actors complaining. Third, it’s robot accounts making posts. Fourth, as proposed in the OP, people are getting the wrong impression due to noisy and problematic bubbles. Fifth, people being scared of leaving their comfort zone. Sixth, a mix of either some or all the previous possibilities.
