Absolutely, though to be fair I trust the anonymous random people running the thousands of fediverse instances and communities far less than a legitimate, traceable company that gets third party audited and has to, at least, follow national laws.
I don’t love Reddit’s owners obviously, but yeah. When it comes to privacy, I don’t have any misconceptions about Lemmy being private in the least. Unfortunately :-(
The difference is advertising. Lemmy has no incentive to sell you out. A company like reddit will squeeze every legal penny out of your personal info and then some more illegally if they think they can get away with it.
just wait 5 years, the fediverse will either be dead or swallowed up by meta. the only two things it has to go for it is the decentralized nature and the absence of open advertisements.
Yeah I wouldn’t be surprised if fb or Reddit started their own Lemmy instances, which they would use to post ads, and have some user-transparent integration with their native platform.
But I bet a lot of instances would de-fed them like you say.
The US has zero privacy laws and, as far as I know, Reddit follows zero audit frameworks (eg SOC 2). Additionally, Reddit currently does not follow its legal burden under state laws.
I’m not saying your mistrust of the fediverse is wrong. I am saying your trust of corporations is completely unfounded and very naive. Trusting the US to do anything is equally naive (see Yahoo, Experian, and multiple alphabet agencies).
Pretty much this. As much as l love the fediverse, there’s still way too many people on reddit giving it way too much activity, especially in gaming: two of the biggest communities I’ve frequented over the course of this year are still only active on reddit.
Other platforms, like lemmy or discord, either have little to none activity on certain topics like the former, or are poorly designed and lackkng to allow its users to search for stuff properly like the latter.
These days I’m much more diverse with my Internet activity, which is good, but man I wish more people just dumped reddit, especially from the communities I needed to drop it the most.
Hell, there’s too many people on Lemmy giving reddit too much activity. I blocked a couple of bots that were literally just yanking posts from reddit. They even left the links right back to reddit giving them the actual traffic. We can do better people. If I want shitty reddit content I would just go there.
People see bots posting massive amounts of content, which zero people want discuss in the comments.
There’s a couple of instances that seem to be dedicated entirely to reposting bots. Every new person who joins Lemmy either is put off by all the bot spam without users, or they have to block several dozen bots and communities to make a usable experience.
It’s no wonder it doesn’t grow any faster. I get the idea that we should take a cue from Reddit on this one, and curate a “new-user-friendly” set of default subscriptions for guests and new signups.
Or maybe defederate from nom.mom to get rid of like 75% of this nonsense.
no, it won't, nor will xitter of facebook. it's delusional to think multi-billion-dollar-platforms backed by big money, the content industry and several clandestine consortiums will cease operation because a single digit percentage of users decided that some hobbyist internet platforms held together by tape and a hail marry are the future. we'll be lucky if places like this are still around in a few years.
Time for a new influx. Everyone still on reddit needs to advertise lemmy.
And not join-lemmy.org, that’s confusing. Just pick one of the larger servers like lemm.ee or fedia.io and tell people to browse it and click “Sign Up” if they like it.
I’d recommend a smaller community to help spread the load. I originally signed up on .world but they were having some growing pains (And a disgruntled idiot ddosing them) so I moved to .ca which helped tremendously.
I really disagree. For learning lemmy for average people, big instance is best.
There is a point where people who stick around are likely to make a new “real” account on a different smaller server, after they know what they want to browse.
Basically big instances should be like training wheels.
Before I left Reddit, I searched for alternatives and saw that people recommended Lemmy or Kbin. But I didn’t know what those things were. I assumed they were just Reddit clones hosted by someone else. I didn’t know that I could create an account on Kbin and interact with other posts in the Fediverse. I didn’t even know what the Fediverse was. So I was stuck with this decision of “do I try Lemmy or Kbin first?”
When I decided to try Lemmy, the first thing you need to do is sign up on an instance. People recommended beehaw.org, but that required filling out an application to join. That seems weird, since I never had to apply to read Reddit. I decided to try another instance (sh.itjust.works) but was worried that I was missing out on what people had recommended about other instances. Maybe I chose the wrong one? Maybe I should make an account on Lemmy.world instead?
It took me a little while to grasp the concept of federation and realize that it made no difference as an end user which instance I chose. I stuck with it, as did everyone reading this, but I think it’s fair to say that the average person has similar barriers to entry. We’ve overcome them, but many, many people will not.
True, the concept of the fediverse is probably what confuses people, it's never explained clearly. I hope it's growth helps spread information about it, how it works and why you want it.
The app situation is getting much much better. The website UI is inferior to old reddit or the apps. I know some servers support the old reddit UI but it’s not discoverable. Stuff like expanding images needs to be easier to do instead of clicking a semi-hidden 10px square each picture.
Sync and Boost are great, though I’m still not happy with the iOS apps (I like Avalon and Mlem, but I don’t live either of them, whereas the Android apps feel fantastic).
Boost is lovely and polished and you can see that tons of work has gone into it.
Tell you what though: while I was waiting for Boost, damned if the Voyager (fka wefwef) PWA came out of nowhere with (I think) some of the nicest UX of any of the contenders, plus an insane release schedule because they can just push changes whenever. Voyager is honestly what has kept me here. (…he says, posting from Boost)
Yup ads and posts on reddit are becoming even more indistinguishable, the “organic community” is just a selling point for marketing because you can embed yourself in it, basically just exploiting their users. The metrics to gauge ad performance is based on things that make the site shitty as well. Reddit, at least the big subs, haven’t been organic in this way for a long time, it’s basically a simulation of an organic online community at this point.
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