It really needs to be everything - posts, comments, subscriptions, upvotes/downvotes, blocks, and mod status. It needs to be such that signing in to your account on the new instance is the same as signing into on the old one. It should be so seamless that you can just switch instances just to try out a new one and switch back again if it isn’t for you.
Indexes are unique to each instance. Post ID, Comment ID, Vote ID. There’s no way to correlate this information between two instances other than to do a full text match, post by post, comment by comment, vote by vote, to determine if what is being imported already exists on the new instance or is “new”.
Even if you go that route, then there’s the quandaries that follow… if you import what is effectively a “new” post to your new instance, do the comments (which aren’t yours) come along, or do you simply end up importing your post with no interaction history.
Then there is identity. You most likely have a non-local identity on your new server, as a result of federation, how does the new instance know that you are who you say you are, givimg you ownership of any of that existing content as it binds it to your, now, local identity?
As long as they’re using UUIDs where they should be the possibility of a collision is literally so low as to be impossible, but that relies on all the pieces of software using good principles.
Message activity contains a UUID but the activity table is considered disposable and is purged regularly. Once the message is broken down into its parts and stored the universal identifier is lost. All correlation is local.
Indexes are unique to each instance. Post ID, Comment ID, Vote ID. There’s no way to correlate this information between two instances other than to do a full text match, post by post, comment by comment
I hope there will be a solution for this. It’s so unpractical. The only sane way to link to posts on other instances seems to be to cross-post them.
If you just share a link to a specific post or comment … people can see it, but unless they happen to have an account on that instance, they cannot interact with it. To do so, you have to search for it, and the search is not reliable.
Why can’t post or comment IDs be generated hashes, and each instance uses the same algorithm?
Someone else did bring up the point that the canonical URL is stored, so that does make correlation a bit easier.
Doesn’t solve the concerns you’ve brought forth. For example, the “I don’t have an account here”. A local instance can correlate a local post to a remote post, being able to provide a “open on original instance” link but it can’t be done the opposite direction, which would relieve this problem.
As for hashing, it too certain what that would gain but at some point there was obviously a decision not to correlate by the message UUID (which would accomplish the same thing). Since I wasn’t in the room can’t say why.
Posts and comments have a canonical URL (i.e. the original submission's URL that's linked to via the Fediverse pentagram), so that can be used as a foreign key when comparing.
I think identify claiming would need to have been designed into the original spec with something like a public/private key for account ownership to allow moving of related data in a safe way, or e.g. editing a post from a different instance than originally posted it.
Like I said, I was just running of the top of my head.
While it’s true they have canonical URLs, there still remains that there’s no apparent method for integrity checks. No way to validate a correlation between the “new user” and the post or comment that can prevent abuse.
Yeah, I wasn't arguing, just thinking out loud too. I think the whole decentralised aspect of the fediverse means that ownership has to have a cryptographic answer because there's no central source of truth that everyone can agree on.
I think moving accounts is a little easier than you think, apart from who gets to say that something should move. It'd be better to have a "pull" than something like the "push" solution that currently exists on Mastodon - there you can forward an account to a new place, as long as the old instance exists and cooperates (big ifs).
I'm mostly thinking about moving accounts (+ communities) in the case of when an instance suddenly vanishes.
Agreed. It really comes down to what is enough to satisfy most people. Exporting subscriptions is an easy implementation. Saved/favorited posts, slightly less easy but very achievable. Each of these could be safely done as a user initiated export/import.
Once you start getting into any type of ownership type work, votes, comments, etc. then it’s starts getting hairy due to integrity concerns. How do we trust that this activity actually belongs to the person claiming it.
Sounds like using GUID instead of id’s would help, but that is not something you just switch, and there’s probably a bit more glue needed for it to be feasible.
let’s hope they’re interesting because it’s novel and the problems were there with other solutions just solved ages ago rather than the alternative: “so many unique situations” because there are a litany of “oops didn’t think of that” moments that will continue to crop up
That’s how things should work honestly. Those that can chip in, should. A beer every so often goes a long way. It’s honestly something I barely notice in my finances too. This time it goes to something I believe in instead of a twitch sub lol.
Subs are kinda like tip, except you get something in return. Usually its emotes you can use on any stream on twitch. Some streamers can make other stuff like sub only discord channel but its optional.
Gift subs are exactly the same except you give the benefits to some other chaters.
My guess is they mean in the sense of “support creaters as you’d like, but don’t throw all your money into it just for them to pay attention to you for a second”
Yep! The developer of Connect for Lemmy is getting caffeinated on a regular basis by me. It’s a perfect fit for the RIF gap in my heart. ;)
He/She(?) is doing an awesome job and it’s amazing how far this app has come in just a few short weeks. I am trying to keep the dev motivated as much as possible, for sure!
My only gripe is that it’s not open source, but that is OK.
Even though I take issue with the BBC, I hope they choose to stay on mastadon in the long term. A large organisation like the BBC on a federated platform is sure to spread word and hopefully convince more people to join the fediverse and see it a a feasible alternative to the current big tech landscape.
This is how twitter and Youtube picked up pace. News organizations stsrted slowly creeping towards it and they have a lot of incentive to do so with how twitter is becoming a cesspool of Nazis and CSAM.
Pretty much the same as the US (and I imagine other English-speaking countries) with similar age distribution (i.e. facebook mums, tiktok kids) and of course toxic cesspit behaviour on twiitter.
Content is improving but the apps well! I’m currently using Voyager (wefwef) and it’s a lot better than when I started using it (around the great Reddit exodus).
The dev said they’d be scaling down support but it’s fine for now and even if it starts lagging behind for some reason there’s a couple of great alternatives as well (Avelon works very well for example).
This is why we need users to spread to more servers and create communities in them. If lemmy.world goes down that shouldn’t result in half of lemmyhub disappearing.
Commenting on your comment not because I expect you to have them or anything, it’s just the top comment so hopefully someone sees this. I know there’s a handful of links out there to browse instances. Are there any that can see who’s defederated with who/ which instances are federated with the most instances? I had another account on a .ml domain instance but they got purged with a bunch of others a couple of weeks ago. I use my lemmy.world account because it has the most-ish reach for finding new communities and whatnot
Currently no, there isn’t a way to see that granular of detail. On my instance I have details about any defederated (blocked) instances. Currently there are none.
But there are pros and cons of joining smaller server. Since mine is small we don’t see a large list of communities, I make a point to go through and subscribe to a bunch everyday so my users can get the best experience. But without others doing some of the leg work it can be challenging. Bigger instances like lemmy.world have “seeded” with communities all over because of their large user base. Not only does lemmy.world have a ton of communities but their users have subscribed to communities outside the instance making it discoverable to others.
Unless you want to see porn or troll instances, I don’t think there’s a big difference between instances except for the fact that beehaw isn’t federated with lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works
Right… I guess for me I’m not sure it’s all that productive to start multiple communities on the same topic? I dunno, maybe it’s good. If I’m looking for something specific, like, say turntables, and I search lemmy for a turntable community, I’m not sure it’d be a good thing to find 3-4 different lemmy communities on the topic. Perhaps I’m just thinking in older, outdated, reddit kind of thinking though.
Yeah I get it. My goal was since the Lemmy world community was pretty inactive if I can post more to encourage activity on mine I can make mine more active and the defacto community which helps get people off of Lemmy world.
If it were a community that is highly active on Lemmy world then I understand it doesn’t seem productive to re create active communities.
I have heard other people voice opinions that having multiple of the same communities over different instances is a good thing with how Lemmy works. I do wish we had a federated community so as people make more communities on different instances it more merges them into one so if one instance goes down the others are still keeping the community alive. But idk if that’s possible or on the Lemmy roadmap.
I’m more of a commenter and less of a poster, but I moved away from world as my primary instance last week. Part to spread the load, part to just be able to browse.
Getting attached to any account is not recommended. Hopefully most are pretty set but I know personally if I was too run into financial trouble I would shut it down. Bigger instances do get some amount of patrons who donate to them.
It feels like a threshold has been crossed. Reddit related content is there but not so dominating as before. People are memeing other things, news and politics discussion is popping up, particularly popular posts from more niche communities as well, it feels like a much more healthy mix of content now compared to the beginning of July and especially compared to when I joined during the reddit blackout.
I looked at the front page of Reddit without logging in a few hours ago and the site is almost unrecognizable. I’m sure there are people that prefer this iteration but I’m fine moving on.
I agree overall, though I’m not convinced the threshold has been passed or reached just yet. If this level of growth can be sustained though, it just might.
I wonder if this will be used as a case study for critical mass of social networks in the future. We have Tildes, Squabbles and Lemmy all competing for scraps off Reddits table and so maybe what we’ll end up with is a fairly clear ballpark for what kind of active user count is needed to reach the snowballing point.
Is Tildes really ‘competing’? The invite-based signup obviously invites the most dedicated and ‘quality’ individuals, but I don’t see how that’s gonna help with critical mass.
As for Squabbles, I’m suspicious of yet another centralized platform. Honestly, I’m just sorta ‘done’ trusting wannabe billionaires.
All three are quite different, which actually makes following their respective growth more interesting to me.
I suppose it’s fair that Tildes is not truly “competing” since they’re invite-only. I don’t have an account there but I’ve heard they want to focus on long-form high effort posts, so it’s never going to be real competition on terms of size, though it will be interesting to see whether a site with that profile can grow enough to thrive.
I’m not a fan of Squabbles personally but some people obviously are since they’re at 30k users soon. It’s run by a single person, and I am a little worried about whether that persons individual preferences influence development too much and in general the way development is heading. I don’t like the layout and I think the logo and name are a hindrance in terms of mass adoption.
On a larger scale though, Squabbles doesn’t allow any NSFW, and that is the benchmark I’m most interested in. Can a site of this nature reach critical mass without it?
Hopefully we’ve not just crossed the activity threshold for people to stick around and shitpost but also for people to figure it’s worth posting some quality stuff here
Depending on what type of quality content you’re after, they might be more related than you think. Shitposting keeps the attention of the larger crowd, and the presence of a large audience makes certain high quality stuff feel more worth it to post.
I would imagine this applies for stuff like AMAs and posting OC artwork etc in particular but I’m sure more things than those.
I think this has been the first week when I didn’t have to like put Lemmy down cause I was just seeing posts I had already seen. It’s nice to have a good feed to scroll again, and not feel like I have to deep dive posts and read every comment just to see something new. Feelsgoodman.
So much this. Exploring this place at first felt a bit empty so to say. Not that much stuff to see or read. Now there's tons of comments, posts and upvote activity that makes this place feel fresh and alive now. FeelsGoodMan indeed, and we're the oned giving it life.
We have hit the critical mass; and that is a cause for celebration. A month ago when I joined, I thought that people would come, post a bit. See the limited content and leave. And I will admit it was painful to use Lemmy back then since a solid 90 percent of posts where about the site or were rips from Reddit. Fingers crossed for the future of Lemmy
It was also painful to use Lemmy back then because any time there was a new post it would push all the old ones down the screen and you’d often literally have to chase the links that you wanted to click. That on top of how generally slow and unreliable the platform was back in June. The technical improvements to Lemmy over the last few weeks have been absolutely amazing.
While there is less reddit content I do feel this past week it just got replaced with meta/threats, and personally it has been kind of even more tiring than reddit content as it has tended to feel like an echo chamber where everyone read the same post and spread a lot of negativity about how Lemmy won’t survive Meta if we don’t block instances that don’t block threats and the like and also the idea going around that if someone wants to federate he is either ignorant or stupid, and talking about that, the elitism on this threats treating everyone on insta and threats as stupid people and saying they don’t sant any of those people here because it dumbs down the content… This last week has been really toxic on the larger communities.
Sorry for that little rant, I had to get that out of my system jeje.
until personal interest groups are populated people will not use this site. its basically 1 big meme sub right now with some tech and politics sprinkled on top.
It feels like it’s mainly talking one way or another about Reddit, or describing how one of the 3P apps is now available for Lemmy. The content is super stale, but it will grow. Fuck, Reddit back in the day was not exactly the thriving metropolis it was maybe six or so years ago. And reddit peaked and came down to how it exists today. So it’ll take time.
That being said, I don’t check Lemmy anywhere near as frequently as I did Reddit, and mainly because the subs I frequented most have smaller footprints here for now. Which is what you said, but in fewer words.
Lol what? Liftoff is fantastic, and FOSS. Are we blaming liftoff for the downward trend/lack of growth? Cause the oh-so-amazing Sync does not seem to have reversed it, to spite all the claims I keep seeing.
Not by a long shot. Connect is good, don’t get me wrong, but Sync has some major points that others usually just completely gloss over or ignore entirely–including Connect.
Like tablet-friendly UI.
And no, Infinity, “tablet-friendly” does not mean like 5 columns of independently scrolling content which take you to one big comment section which is a mobile UI stretched to screen size.
Tablet UI–let alone good, productive tablet UI like Sync has with pagination and all–is always overlooked.
I’m in the process of making some stuff, I just worry that the community I post it to on lemmy isn’t big enough to get the word out community-wide.
For context, I’ve been working on a very long dogelore thing. But in the same way, I feel like this hurts any bhj or mtcj stuff I might do. The community on lemmy isn’t big enough to get traction, so what’s the point?
I’m not going back to reddit, and discord is annoying, so it’s just a little discouraging.
The two biggest ones I know of are startrek.website for trekkies and blahaj for all things trans/lgbtq. But even those don’t see to have much activity. We need better advertisement to smaller communities somehow.
its not about the instances, those are actually hindering growth by dividing communities across instances and defederating them. lemmy is basically several copies of reddit in a trench coat pretending to be a social network.
For what it’s worth, memes have helped me stay. I doubt I’m the only one.
They’re quick and easy to browse and some get a bunch of topical comments and links to other relevant communities.
It’ll take a while to reach a level that’s known in the public eye like Twitter and Reddit, but the low-hanging fruit helps keep people interested while more niche communities are forming.
I’ve been posting on the HP and Tolkien communities and begun modding them too. I’d encourage people to post, and if necessary take up a little responsibility too.
There was a scientific paper I read semi recently that showed that researchers who post on Mastodon get much higher quality interaction than on Twitter (and I think a few other social-media type places, but it was mainly Mastodon vs Twitter). There was overall less interaction on Mastodon (unsurprisingly), but also that this difference has been diminishing as Mastodon grows. My takeaway is that if you want engagement, go Mastodon.
Reddits quality main appeal also is its past threads whereas on Twitter is rarely about what was tweeted but rather what’s the latest thing that’s happening.
Lemmy will need time and it might never replace reddit. But I look forward to the quality interactions with everyone here!
Unpopular opinion? Mastodon is a better Twitter than Lemmy is a better Reddit.
That’s not unpopular, that’s just fact. I enjoy Lemmy but it’s fairly new. Mastodon has been around for a while longer and is a much more mature platform with more QOL features because of that. Comparing them on that basis doesn’t really prove or mean anything at this point. Of course the teenager is more developed than the toddler, that’s how it works. Lemmy will get to the same place with time.
Twitter’s value is/was that it was ubiquitous. Everyone (important) was there and it was the only Twitter-like thing that there was. Even the Pope tweets. I guarantee you the Pope will never be on Mastodon. Not that any of us necessarily care about updates from the Pope or Lebron James or whoever, but your favorite journalist was, and the developers of all your favorite indie iOS apps were, and if you live in a city, your local public transit authority was likely there as well. Twitter was really the only place for microblogging type of content.
On the other hand, Reddit is, by nature, just a centralized collection of forums, which I think is far more easily recreated in a decentralized way. You already have posts organized into communities, now with Lemmy we’re just adding another layer of organization on top of that. As another commenter said, much of Reddit’s value is that it was the place where someone asked the same question you now have and so you can read those answers, but Twitter’s value really is for real time communications.
The issue I see with both frankly is search. It can be kinda hard with either to find the community/discussions that are interesting and relevant to you, but hopefully that will improve.
I guarantee you the Pope will never be on Mastodon
Doubt that. Vatican uses Linux, if it gets popular enough they’re for sure going to have their own Mastodon instance. When you’re a big org like them, control matters more than dollar amounts. A recruiting and comms tool that they own end-to-end, except for the protocol (that they can block or mod anytime)? They’d love it. Having a Vatican.va Mastodon handle if you work for them would probably carry cachet with Catholics.
You’re insane if you actually believe that this will happen, but also I hope it does. I reckon they’re more likely to change their position on homosexuality.
It’s not anywhere as crazy as it seems. The Vatican already airs mass in Esperanto, for example, and has done so for quite a long time. Just installing a docker image with Masto in one of their VPSes and setting up and auth connected to some other central services they also already have is perfectly within the reaches of such a small indie dev.
I read somewhere this is an upcoming feature. Let’s say you subscribe “memes” then you got shown all communities named “memes” from federated servers combined.
It’s not the server on Mastodon but the hashtags. Put in an area of interest and you can follow that entire hash tag. For instance, put in #cars and see what comes up.
Yes, follow lots of hashtags of interest, and follow lots of people that post stuff you’re interested in. I’ve seen it said before that once you have about 200 accounts you’re following you will have a nice volume of interesting posts in your home feed.
How do you find good people to follow? There aren’t all too many meme or comedy accounts and that really all I’m looking for. It seems pretty serious on there unless I’m just being dumb. I’m on mastadon.social
I’m also seeing a bunch of posts not in English, sometimes nearly half so that gets annoying
You need to follow hashtags and groups related to your interest. Groups will boost the toots and make them visible. When you follow a group, it’s like following hundreds of people at once.
When tooting, you have to mention groups and not only hashtags. The groups will boost the toot for visibility.
I was a teacher for a private company at 17. I taught kids aged 6-14. A couple of my students I had occasional intrusive sexual thoughts about.
She was 8, which was way below my AoA of 12+, and she certainly hadn’t started puberty. But she was attractive. She made me nervous, I thought about her everyday, I envisioned what we’d do together–she was just like any crush to me, only instead of an adult, she was a kid. But does that really make a difference? She was a person. What should age have to do with love? Eventually shit happened.
There seems to be so much of that on here. Really hope to see more moderation preventing all that bad faith fake LGBT assholes from posting shit especially when they’re pushing nambla trash.
Uuuunfortunately, that turned out to be an easily-accessible post that was barely chopped up probably for brevity more than anything else. Wasn't one of their students, it was some 8yr old at their apartment complex.
Dunno if you're from there or defensively made assumptions, but the MAP community was gonna come out fairly quick regardless and go over just as well.
That is the current front page of the MAP magazine on rqd2. You can look for it yourself or you can use this link. By all means don't just take my word for it.
I only preface this with one warning.
I have moderated various platforms over the years, some with kids and some with vulnerable people including troubled teens and disabled people. I've seen just about everything and shaken off everything. The only exceptions involved the sexual abuse of minors. Those are the ones I remember. Dealing with this kind of stuff, even as just a moderator, an outside party if you will, hurt my soul.
What's on this page is by no means graphic, either in textual details or images, but is instead disturbing in another way. Knowing what kinds of situations the kids these people talk to are inches away from, or heck, possibly are neck deep in already, and they talk about it like you and I might talk on a relationship magazine on any other instance.
If it was a lot more like 'how do I deal with this so that the people around me are safe?' I'd be a lot more sympathetic to the mag and instance to be honest.
There are some pedos that do their utmost to deal with it in a safe way, like avoiding kids where possible and getting psychiatric help. I'd have no problem at least leaving that group alone.
Hello! I’m AR15U! I’m the owner of rqd2.net! I’m transgender and transrace, and questioning transage and transabled. I’m a MAP as well
What in the unmitigated fuck is this? How can someone be so ridiculous… transrace? Transage?! Transabled?!! Is this some sort of weird roleplay to make trans people look silly?
Yeah, I think Poe’s Law may be in full effect here. The law basically states that without some sort of signifier that it is parody, it’s impossible to create a parody of an extremist that is so extreme that it’ll never be mistaken as genuine. It was originally applied to fundamentalist Christians, but has since been expanded to pretty much any trolling or extremist viewpoints.
I genuinely hope that it’s a troll trying to make trans people look bad. Because that’s honestly the best-case scenario. The idea of this person actually existing is more gross than the alternative. Because if they actually exist, then it means they’re not just a troll trying to make trans people look bad. It means they’re a goddamned predator who needs to be sequestered away from the rest of society, and should never be allowed near children.
The idea of this person actually existing is more gross than the alternative. Because if they actually exist, then it means they’re not just a troll trying to make trans people look bad.
People like this are guaranteed to exist. With the wide spectrum of sexualities out there plus the sheer numbers of human population, there was more than likely going to be a few that are trans and pedo. Just like how there are Catholic pedos, Buddhist pedos, certainly hetero pedos and yes, some gay pedos.
Any attempts to hold up a trans/pedo or a gay/pedo as the norm for trans or gay communities needs to be shot down as the disingenuous crap that it is, because we know damn well that we can hold up a cis/pedo or a hetero/pedo as the norm and it would obviously be just as invalid.
Oh I agree. The issue is that half of the population seems to be convinced that gay people are all pedos, because that’s the narrative that has been pushed lately. And shit like this only helps perpetuate the idea and add fuel to the fire.
I don’t doubt there’s people who are trans and also paedo, I expect the same prevalence in that group as any other group. But this list of trans-things is just mental. I’m finding it hard to accept someone could unironically claim to be all those things.
Though I wonder if the transable thing is reference to those ridiculous people who like, deliberately blind or maim themselves because they ‘feel disabled’
I keep seeing messages in my inbox from this post that have a good number of downvotes and are deleted by the user or a mod. This is some hornet’s nest we’ve kicked.
Unfortunately, there are actually people like this.
“Transabled” is a term some people use that wish to be disabled. There were even cases of people who paid doctors illegally to amputate a limb or they hurt themselves.
“Transage” are people who believe they actually have a different age. For example they feel like they are really 13. Some of them use that to justify relationships with minors.
They try to piggyback on the trans movement and present mental acrobatics in a whole new dimension of fucked up to explain why they are supposedly similar to people who are trans. (Which they really obviously aren’t, I think that doesn’t need explaining.)
And you can bet on it that trolls and right wingers use these obscure group of mentally unwell people to attack LGBTQ people and movements.
What’s horrifying is the amount of pedo apologists on some lemmy instances. They screech that as long as they aren’t touching kids they’re free to be attracted to kids because it’s not hurting anyone. Anyone that looks at a kid and thinks sexual thoughts already crossed a line and should never be allowed access to children or the internet. Horrifying. Pedo is not a sexual orientation.
They screech that as long as they aren’t touching kids they’re free to be attracted to kids because it’s not hurting anyone
The person in the quote you’re responding to is saying they actually abused a child and are defending that act. IMO this in particular should be much more harshly condemned; communities of people excusing and telling each other it’s ok to abuse children.
If I have a question that I’d usually search on reddit for, i just make a post here instead and drum up content for the future, plus I usually get way more than I asked for from people as almost everyone here is a damn genius and usually very polite and understanding.
Go to your instance homepage, lemmy.ml then in the sidebar there should be a create community button, or if on mobile it may be hidden in the … menu button
edit: accidentally deleted this comment so just reposting.
It would be wonderful with something more granular than “NSFW”…
I would love if we got something even more granular like a "Content Warning: ".
Examples:
Content Warning: nudity - might be a painting with nude people, might be a photo of nude people, in essence if it isn’t porn, but there’s exposed genitals, butts or breasts.
Content Warning: porn - you can probably guess…
Content Warning: gore - images with gore, people missing body parts, often dead as well.
Content Warning: death - images with people dying, but without gore.
Content Warning: blood - images with some blood, but no death or gore. (often seen in news articles)
Content Warning: violence - people fighting, but without turning bloody.
These could of course be expanded with many more categories if need be.
The first two and the last three are the same lol.
There really isn’t any need for tuning them even further. They’re both already niche enough as is. The people who are good with the two are good with both. The people good with the last three are ‘good’ with any. You genuinely cannot get any of them without the other lol.
Intensity warning is a good thing. Though it does make tagging complicated, but in this case overlapping tags would do. blood-death and gore-death and simply death.
probably shouldn’t borrow the exact terms from fandom, but they have tag modifiers like ‘dead dove: do not eat’ which basically means this is an absolute celebration of the previous tag, so gore tag coupled with that tag is gore intensified to the max, while they also use tags ‘slight mentions of gore’ for only a bit of gore. but if you filter out gore both would still be filtered out.
AO3 runs on open source software and has a very robust tagging system.
Yeah, it’d be better to implement OP’s idea, see how it goes, and then see if there’s need for the others. Gradual changes help admins see what works best, I think. Follow the KISS: Keep It Simple, Supid.
It does feel a little dead here. Right now it’s mostly memes, meta discussions, or Reddit hate. And the crowd is a very specific type of hyper aware internet dweller (myself included).
Reddit isn’t worth using without third party apps, and it’s the only social media I used before Lemmy, so I’m spending a lot more time off my phone nowadays. I only check the daily top on Lemmy once a day instead of compulsively every time I touch my phone. Guess that’s a good thing.
I disagree. While I do like that the discussions and top level comments are not nearly as homogenized as Reddit eventually became, I’m really missing the niche communities. I wasn’t subscribed to any large subs on Reddit, so my feed was basically just a curated list of discussions for my hobbies. No memes, news, pop culture, internet drama, or politics. Right now, that’s just not possible on Lemmy due to the low population.
Give it time. Lemmy is still very fresh, but I’m confident smaller niche communities will keep popping up and it will eventually add up. Region and country locales seems to be doing well.
Exactly. What I feel we might be suffering from is the status quo. We‘re so used to being in walled gardens that we assume homogeneity. But this will not be the case if there are thousands of instances. You then might have an instance that is manga themed or retro themed and so on with themed versions of the other places etc. sounds like fun to me.
But the bottom line is that we need critical mass for this since that ensures visibility.
Yeah, the lack of many of my favorite niche communities makes me constantly wonder if I should just “suck it up” and go back to Reddit. I miss so many of them. If I wanna discuss a particular TV show or video game, often I just don’t have much of an option here, cause the community specific to that TV show or game is very likely dead.
We also don’t yet have many interesting text post subs that I liked to read on Reddit, like AITA, Best of Legal Advice, Best of Redditor Updates, Hobby Drama, etc.
Similarly, my local city sub is pretty dead (and never shows up on the front page cause the sorting algorithms suck). So I barely have any local interaction anymore! I met real life people on Reddit and it was great for getting advice from others who live in my city.
I’ve had the same thought, but sucking it up would mean using the official Reddit app or old Reddit on my phone/tablet (at least until they kill that, too), which are both just too annoying of an experience to be worth it to me. It’s not a principle thing, it’s a usability thing.
For the time being, I’ve just accepted that it’s gone and I’ll miss it for a good while. I’ve been browsing some old school forums for my random hobbies (Gear Page, Hard Forum, Steam, Fresh Loaf etc.), but otherwise, I’ve found other things to occupy my down time until either Lemmy’s smaller communities take off or something else fills the anonymous-niche-hobby-social-media void. Got me some cool books and Picross on Switch.
I’m fairly sure Reddit has something similar so users don’t keep seeing the same one popular community again and again.
For context, Reddit used to (5 years ago?) show multiple posts from the same community on /r/all, then they implemented a unique function that made it so only one post per sub was shown in the top X. This greatly improved /r/all. It was controversial and well documented.
It was weird at first but it really helped engagement and medium sized communities. I think if that PR makes it it would greatly improve Lemmy too.
I blocked the major meme subs (coms?) and my experience here has been much, much better. Free yourself of last year’s memes and explore all the interesting links getting posted
Yes, those meme communities are very active and drown other posts from other communities. Unsubscribing them drastically improve my experience. I can sort by New now and see Posts from communities I subscribed to. And unlike Reddit, new posts got pretty good engagements here, perhaps because other people browse by New too.
It would be nice if you could block a community directly from the front page without having to navigate to it first. Whole instances would also be useful.
The sorting algorithm fixes can’t come soon enough IMO. Small subs are dead because they simply can’t show up on the front page with most of the sorting algorithms that Lemmy has. That limits how much you’ll see in your feed and also makes Reddit a better product (due to all the niche subs it has that actually show up on the front page).
The one I use - memmy - frequently has issues with widgets that stop responding, and currently is glitching such that the upvote/downvote buttons are superimposed over the posts. Search results show all communities as having 3k subscribers even if there’s actually only single digits. If you highlight text to make a link, it overwrites the text with the empty link rather than making the text into a link. Mlem and Liftoff - the other two I checked - have their own issues.
I think we can also do a better job hiding the complexity of federations from novice users and cut down on the impact of bot-based crossposting by detecting that the lines articles are identical. I could see, for instance, discussions being merged on the client side.
I found reddit neither usable nor interesting before Alien Blue, and I suspect there are a number of potential users out there who would onboard or increase engagement here with a better UX.
Once 3rd party lemmy apps get up to snuff it’ll be easier to switch. The .ml loss probably hurt us and for now a lot of redditors would rather complain than leave.
Please for anyone reading, just be patient. Keep posting and commenting and it WILL grow. There are only like 1.2 million Lemmy users versus hundreds of millions of redditors.
If you follow the 90-9-1 rule, that leaves very few actual contributors and still Lemmy has a lot of good content daily. Just be patient and it will come.
Ah, that makes sense. In my case though, I used to never post on Reddit but on Lemmy I feel good contributing to this community. I hope a lot of the other Reddit refugees who lurked feel the same way
Yeah I lurked on Reddit because most responses were either pedantic or laced with sarcasm. I feel like the assholes haven’t ingratiated themselves yet.
I can’t find it now. The number that I saw was 1.09 million, but I can’t find the site I saw it on now. I think a bunch of them must be purged spam accounts maybe.
Yeah I’m waiting it out and trying to build up my favorite community. I don’t really see reddit ever being replaced but that’s only because people won’t be part of the solution. There are too many people in this world that just don’t care.
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