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Why do people on reddit seem to hate Lemmy/Mbin/other federated link aggregators?
(lemmy.dbzer0.com)
this post was submitted on 09 Nov 2024
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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.
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.
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.
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:-).
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.
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:-).
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.
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.
don't let them change the meaning of our words then
Likewise the heroic nerds of the Threadiverse coined the term months before Threads was even announced, and they would be hard pressed to give it up to some scumbag billionaire.
It's an epic culture war being fought between two largerly agreeing parties.
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
Wouldn't it also cause confusion for some people to say Threadiverse while other people refuse to say that and instead use Fediverse?
Ofc strictly speaking both are true.
Hehe, Forumverse? :-)
the threadiverse is a subset of the fediverse (microblog + threaded forums)
forumverse isnt a bad suggestion... doesnt seem to roll off the tongue though. im going to use threadiverse as its the value i want to see and i dont give 2 shits about meta.
One line of thinking that intrigues me, which you might be interested in as it relates even more to Mbin: at what point do we differentiate between where the content is located, vs. how we access it?
So like PieFed exists - I am talk to you from it right now - but if I were to make a post, let's say to [email protected], then am I posting on "Lemmy"? There is next to no content that is exclusively located "on" an instance running PieFed itself, so PieFed is my vehicle to access Lemmy content, in a way?
Then again, a better way would be to say that it was PieFed content, shared "with" the Lemmy instance where the community is moderated (via the ActivityPub protocol), and from there shared around the world, to whatever people are running to receive it - Mbin, Kbin, Sublinks, Tesseract, etc.
And all of that is still just within the Threadiverse, but how to say what Mbin does? Does Mbin access "Mastodon content" as well as "Lemmy content", or rather "microblog content on the Fediverse" as well as "threaded content on the Fediverse"?
I am not even sure what name the "microblog content on the Fediverse" goes by, b/c people usually say just "Fediverse", but also things like PixelFed (Instagram replacement) and Friendica (Facebook replacement) are part of the Fediverse too, so if "threaded content on the Fediverse" becomes "Threadiverse", then "microblog content on the Fediverse" is going to have to be renamed to something other than Fediverse too?
Since in the last six months Mbin doubled the number of comments made monthly, the distinction is becoming more noticeable - yet it is still 10k posts and 75k comments, vs. 9.4 million posts and 16.7 million comments from something running the software "Lemmy" (https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats).
Then too, if Lemmy.World switched over to use Sublinks (as they hinted at several months ago...), would most of this content (especially since ~80% of the Lemmy userbase is located on that server) switch from being "Lemmy" to now "Sublinks"? Setting aside the question of "what even is Lemmy, anyway?", my question to you is: what even is Mbin, anyway? Does it cross-browse "Mastodon and Lemmy content", or is it like a new, hybrid thing, b/c it doesn't just browse e.g. Mastodon content, but also can host its own microblog-formatted content too, shared with servers that run Mastodon as its software, as well as its own forum-based content shared with servers that run Lemmy (which can replace themselves with Sublinks) and PieFed.
Whew, this is getting complex!? No wonder people just say "Fediverse" and leave it at that!:-P
i used to call the micrblog stuff the 'twitterverse'.. and i kind of still want to. I may edit my mbin instance to use that term, and i also hate 'magazine' in favor of 'Subs' or 'Community'
to me all of these server products are federating media servers with varying access to those 2 pieces. the underlying software should be nearly irrelevant except for them.
the 'community/magazine' is the source of the data and 'remote' servers cache that data. when i post to tenforward im posting to the source@itshomeinstance and my server receives a copy.. a locally cached version.
my server still has a ton of kbin.social content for example despite that server being doa.
i refer to my instance, at the moment, as primarily an 'onramp' server. my users utilize it to access remote content almost exclusively as you point out piefed does. But, my server also caches a huge amount of fediverse data.. both from all the lemmys and major microblog platforms mastodon, threads, and universodeon among others.
the specific platform lemmy.world utilizes should have no impact on me or my users if they do things correctly.
Twitterverse - oh that's interesting!:-)
Irrelevant software - especially if forum-based (Threadiverse), user-based (Twitterverse), and other content (PixelFed/Insta, Loops underneath that, and whatever Friendica is about) were all to end up conjoined into a single "Feed" of whatever mixture proportions the user wants, that would indeed become a true "Fediverse":-).
But until that time... some of them do still seem somewhat separate, though perhaps artificially so.
federation - I made a post yesterday, but due to federation issues it now sits solely on PieFed (viewable from https://piefed.social/c/[email protected]?sort=new&layout=list), and presumably is not available from any other instances as well (e.g. looking at https://discuss.online/c/[email protected]?dataType=Post&sort=New, I do not see it). That's perhaps a fine example of how the various vehicles that we use to access the Fediverse are distinct from the sources of content - although tbh that type of occurrence is nowhere close to being unique wrt PieFed, as I've had similar things happen with StarTrek.website and heard of many such occurrences with the likes of Aussie.Zone and Programming.Dev, etc.
Some instances COULD theoretically hold content - e.g. PieFed has a Local filter where people discuss the specific issues relating to PieFed software, as well as a trollyproblems community, etc. - but in practice, the vast majority of content derives from Lemmy.World, or wherever the particular community (or magazine) is based in. And this too is not unique to PieFed - e.g. my previous instance Discuss Online likewise has a couple of communities (e.g. [email protected]), but the vast majority of that instance is as a "general purpose" one that mainly pulls in content from elsewhere rather than holding it on its own.
So such "onramp" servers are common across the Fediverse - whether running Mbin, Kbin, Lemmy, PieFed, or one day Sublinks, that's just a property of how the instance admin chooses to do things, and the people who want (or don't want) to make communities there.
And yeah, if Lemmy.World switched from Lemmy to Sublinks, or to PieFed, or even Mbin, then it would cease to be called "Lemmy" (although other servers would still be that, like Discuss Online), though would still fall under the heading "Fediverse", and whatever mid-range term used like "Threadiverse" as well. Although people seem to hate that term and argue whenever it is brought up.
I totally agree though - such software details shouldn't matter, and rather it's the "content" that we want to aim at, however we end up getting there:-).
The instance I first chose straight up disappeared, so yeah. It wasn't an easy migration.
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.
In contrast to reddit, whos leadership never made any controversial decisions. /s