this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2023
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Lemmy has a lot of obstacles that will prevent it from truly going mainstream:
The community browser is complete dog shit for discovering content on different instances, and trying to view another instance's content from your own community is just needlessly complex. Discoverability is still a lot better than Mastodon though, where you'd look at all post and see nothing but hentai reposting bots regurgitating stuff that isn't even allowed on NSFWLemmy...
Due to the nature of federation, you also run the risk of committing to an instance only for them to defederate entirely, or disassociate from content you want to see but they don't agree with. Beehaw is a very good example of this.
As there's no option (yet) to migrate to a different instance, and Lemmy is a FOSS project that cannot be monetized in the same way as a traditional social media site, what happens when instances start shutting down due to being unable to keep up with server hosting costs?
I cannot speak for the iOS option available, but Jerboa is barebones. For example, you can't even tap on a post/comment reply in your inbox to go to that comment's permalink and view the context. This is incredibly basic functionality for any social news aggregator. Even with the fediverse in general surpassing 150,000 users, I don't see Lemmy getting the same level of third-party app support as Reddit had.
These are all valid complaints, but I feel like you need to put this into perspective. This platform has blown up in the last week, change is going to come but itβs going to take some time. Iβm sure it will go faster now that it is really taking off though.
I am quite confident that the platform will go up in quality quick. Here is why I am confident:
GitHub Lemmy Activity Pulse (LemmyNet / lemmy)
One or two of the devs might have some strange opinions, but if one thing's for sure, they solved a bug report ticket I opened in just a single day--yeah turns out it was a simple fix, but that's a damn impressive turnaround. Just sayin'.
These concerns are valid.
Some are transitory however - 1, 3 and 4 all reflect the current state of Lemmy and the similar Kbin are in currently. The Reddit issues were unexpected and people have migrated en masse to Lemmy/Kbin and have found was is in many ways Alpha software. This issues will mostly be resolved with time, and that is probably accelerated now as more people means more people interested in development, and motivated by anger at Reddit. I don't think Lemmy/Kbin will replace Reddit right now, but I think a new trajectory has been set. Communities are hitting critical mass to keep growing.
Look at Mastodon, it's at 1.2m-2m active users each month; it is still small fry and niche compared to Twitter but it exploded thanks to Twitter's mess, and is growing. I think we're seeing something similar with Lemmy and Kbin, but this is just the start of a long road and an expanded community will accelerate improvement and growth.
But point 2 is fundamental to the fediverse - fragmentation due to defederating could be a concern. I get Beehaw's motivation but I think their actions will consign them to a niche part of the Fediverse, but that may be what they want. Ultimately I suspect the biggest servers will dominate a main interconnected fediverse through sheer size and notoriety - new servers will need to federate to the big players to grow. It's not necessairly a bad thing - but people may end up signed up to a "main" large interconnected "fediverse" and separately to smaller niche communities they're interested in but sitting in their own walled gardens/bubbles. It's not necessairly a bad thing though - it is just different to what people are used to with social media like Reddit. It'll be a trade off - servers and communities have complete independence and some will go for what suits them - part of a big fediverse or only federating to smaller aligned communities.
A lot of these issues are temporary. Also, this is all happening very fast, it's entirely possible that some other website/service will pop up that'll be a lot better thought out.
Reddit was already well established and functional during the Exodus of Digg, so there wasn't much discussion about where to go. Today we have no solid alternative, so people are trying Lemmy, Kbin, Mastodon, Squabbles and other websites.
Digg is kinda before my time, what did they do to cause the exodus?
They let corporations submit blog posts (company spam, basically) and they'd instantly go to the top, pushing any normal submissions down into oblivion. Management thought that more ads will get them more revenue, but instead everyone just left.
It was a combination of factors.
They redesigned the website, which was a complete wipe of the service. All your submissions, comments, etc. Gone. That upset a lot of people.
They also changed their algorithm to prioritize paid promotional content over user submitted content, and they created a "power user" class whose content and liked articles would be more likely to reach the front page, too.
They changed the look and layout of the site dramatically, and also altered how things eventually ended up on the front page. It was in an effort to make more money via advertising/paid posts, and it literally killed the site overnight.
Reddit is doing their best Digg v4 impression right now. History doesn't repeat itself, but it sure as fuck rhymes.
You can, but only in the latest version. It takes multiple taps, though.
How?
Yeah... I don't get any of the icons below my inbox messages. And according to Google Play, I have the latest version of Jerboa.
This is on a OnePlus 9 Pro, Android version 13 (OxygenOS.)
The latest version is 0.34, and even though it was released almost a week ago, it still isn't on Google Play AFAIK. Google Play has a vetting process that takes time. It's to make sure people aren't putting malware on their store. I ended up uninstalling from Google Play and installed from GitHub. It's less safe, as someone could theoretically sneak malware into the codebase, but I guess I like to live dangerously.
undefined> what happens when instances start shutting down due to being unable to keep up with server hosting costs?
Well idk about you guys but self hosting is always an option. Not easy, but an option
Server costs are not as high as Reddit made us believe. You can probably run a 10 user instance for less than 10β¬/month.
If the instance is good donations could keep it up forever, not even expensive donations. Certainly a fraction of what reddit is asking for reddit premium.
It's one of those times where I wish I learned programming/computer science and not History and accountancy.
I studied something completely unrelated with computer science. I started with programming and then with general computer science and now I know a lot of things and I'm quite probably going to land a job in IT field next year. It's never late to learn something new.
Coding is hard though, especially when you go past the basic tutorial stuff (Hello World, if statements, for/while loops, libraries, etc.) Actual computer science and understanding all the technical and mathematical aspects of computing is orders of magnitude harder than writing some C# or Javascript code.
Last time I actually tried to make an effort to learn how to code was back in the days when /r/CarlHProgramming was still active, long before Carl Herold was arrested on heinous child sex crimes.
If the fediverse gets very big, won't your instance need a lot of bandwidth and storage to sync all the content?
It's requirements will grow, but it's still mostly text and some images. Mastodon is kind of big (not twitter big but bigger and more active than lemmy) and there are people still self hosting their instance and there's lots of donation supported instances.
I think fediverse being instance-oriented should scalate well. As no instance really needs to hold the whole thing by its own.
Mlem for iOS is in an open beta right now and it's pretty good. Not as good as Apollo yet, of course
On 4, what's up with this? Being fixed?
4 is already fixed in the alpha of jerboa, and the functionality is there but got accidentally hidden in the current version. You have to hold-click in your inbox to see context. These kind of hiccups are normal in a very new foss browser.