this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2023
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I don't know if you've noticed this, but threads or comments about Lemmy or the Fediverse get downvoted a lot on Reddit and trolls who claim that it's "dogshit" and "not going anywhere" get systematically upvoted.

Some of those trolls get then exposed when you ask them what Lemmy instance they tried and one of them with whom I had a surreal exchange answered with something like "yeah ofc I used Lemmy, this is the instance: join-lemmy.org" πŸ€¦β€β™‚οΈ

It's frustrating that these trolls keep contributing to the big lie that "Lemmy is not ready yet" and that there's "no viable alternative to Reddit".

This and the overwhelming number of comments being "against the mod protests" just prompts me to question whether there isn't some brigading being organized straight from the Reddit HQ.

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[–] Zebov 117 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Probably bots. Reddit has been using them for some time, but recently got caught using chat gpt or something similar to argue against the blackouts.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago

The majority arenβ€˜t bots. Most of them are legit no lifers to whom Reddit going down the drain would be a huge blow. I mean you work full time as a cashier for taco bell and you are not really happy with that situation. Some people go to school again, learn a skill… others spend all their time one Reddit stockpiling karma. Those are the people who really hate lemmy and anything that could remotely make Reddit worse, because they are heavily invested in the platform for the wrong reasons.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Do you have a source for this claim? I'm very interested in reading about it

[–] bloodtide 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Which is fking insane since one of Steve’s excuses for upping API pricing so high is to fight LLM from training on β€œtheir” dataset! Fucking LOL

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[–] [email protected] 86 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Unfortunately there's probably a large amount of users who simply don't care.

But that's okay. What matters is content creators, not content consumers. Anyone with half a gram of decency and self integrity will have realized that they need to take steps to move away from Reddit.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago (4 children)

When the content creators leave and go to Lemmy/Kbin, eventually those content consumers will leave and go with them too. Will be a bonus for the Fediverse

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago (1 children)

We need to ask Louis Rossmann to join the fediverse. He's been super critical with Reddit on YouTube.

[–] impulse 21 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm sure he's already aware and will make an account if he wants to.

There's no point in shoving the Fediverse in someone's face.

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[–] Extra_Cucumber_2979 79 points 1 year ago (19 children)

Once - unfortunately - Apollo app will be down, in less than 2 weeks, I’m pretty sure Lemmy will surge and they will come complaining here πŸ˜…

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[–] SterlingVapor 66 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Here's the thing - we've been raised from birth to think "people don't make things, companies do".

Most people have never used software that isn't company branded, they've never sat in a chair made by someone they know, they've never pulled food out of the ground. Almost all jobs set someone up doing a service with a supply chain behind them or doing one small step of something bigger.

It's learned helplessness. They don't have the concept of how they could do things outside of the hierarchy - solid chance they've tried, and since their skills are hyper-specialized and rely on big, expensive tools, they found they had a lot of gaps.

Anything you do outside of a company is a hobby to most people. And even then, people organize into sports leagues and buy fancy toys instead of just meeting up in the park with a ball... Do you really need to play by professional rulesets when you're just trying to exercise?

This time around, I didn't bother to explain why the decentralization is so important to my friends and family - even the technical ones are almost afraid of the idea of it.

Instead, I told them about the ways Reddit has picked up the harmful strategy that Facebook used, and that makes mobile gaming so addicting yet so unfulfilling: show them less of the content they want to change the reward schedule, training you to use the app longer for a smaller dopamine hit. Show you content that will make you feel angry, driving up engagement. And most importantly, always wave the promise of another dopamine hit.

The app is eggregious - it sprinkles in stuff from top communities I left a long time ago because they suck, it gives you suggestions for new communities and presents them like interaction from other users, and it sends you notifications to tempt you back in all the time.

And this is just the beginning, it's going to get a lot worse With all the other social networks eyeing their own strategies to squeeze their users, it's going to suck across the board, and good luck trying to build relationships outside these platforms

I think it's important to remember we're animals, and we're not just trainable, we're the most trainable by a large margin. The best of us have just a handful of moments where we see beyond our instincts and conditioning, and decide to train ourselves

This project is important, because it can give us back communities small enough to get to know each other, while providing a larger forum for ideas, and with a design that can shrug off attempts to control it.

It's going to fragment. Sections of it will break off into echo chambers, admins will sell out their users, and parts will offer a curated walked garden hosted. But it can survive all that because of one simple truth - unless one person captures the majority of the network, they're going to have to cut off the best part of the network. Social media can be profitable without sucking, but to rake in profits it has to suck - and even then, we can start up servers for friends and family, and rebuild the network organically

I'm working for an app streamlined enough I can send it to my mom and have her sign up without getting scared off, and I think I've got a solid idea of how to improve discovery of communities without becoming distributed rather than decentralized. Other people are building their own visions of what this can become, and a lot of people are writing impressive code (Lemmy has no business scaling as well as it has), and the beauty of it is that it all competes while adding to the whole.

I've been at it for 30 hours now, but I can't shake the feeling that me getting this out this out in the next few days is going to matter if this is going to become what I hope instead of another shard of Reddit.

But every time I step away to take a breather, I end up back on here and see a glimpse of what this could be

The only way to change the world is to release something self-perpetuating and self-reinforcing and intrinsically positive, and hope it grows

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[–] XanXic 64 points 1 year ago (5 children)

It's sort of an asshole problem. All the cool people are walking away from Reddit, or at the very least trying to support the blackout/boycott. So all that's left are the chronically online people, apathetic lurkers, and assholes who purposefully don't care. The assholes are now seeming more vocal because all the logical voices are burned out or gone. Provided the good contributors/commenters stay away. Eventually lurkers won't enjoy a ton of pissy comments on everything and look for more interesting discussion to peruse. Then the assholes will just be being assholes to each other, then be like man this place is full of assholes, and go look for a healthier community to be an asshole too because they don't want people who fight back like they do lol.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Hey hey hey. I’m chronically online. That’s why I care enough to be here instead of Reddit!

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[–] Monkeyhog 60 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I haven't noticed that because I no longer look at reddit. I suggest you do the same.

[–] croobat 25 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah, OP is getting hate-baited hard.

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[–] croobat 47 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Dude, you are recommending Pepsi in a Coca-Cola forum.

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[–] [email protected] 45 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Lemmy isn’t ready yet to completely replace Reddit for most people, and that’s part of the fun!!

[–] IMongoose 28 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The thing is, there are pretty much two distinctly separate reddits, new and old. New reddit is flashy with live videos and more media than text, and old is very text based. And then if you are using an app like RIF, you don't even have chat. For me, old reddit is very much like browser lemmy and going from RIF to Jerboa was very seemless. It's almost the same thing. But if someone actually likes new reddit and their app(I saw a graph that like 80% of users use it) lemmy is not going to cut it.

But imo lemmy is in a great spot right now. It could definitely be better but it's growing a lot. I'm liking it at least.

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[–] Something_Complex 13 points 1 year ago (6 children)

We are pretty of the first migration, one the land is settled more will come

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[–] [email protected] 37 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Lmao, who cares what they think?

But also, Lemmy isn't ready, which isn't a bad thing at all.

What it is, is viable. And that should scare the shit out of reddit

[–] jpenczek 11 points 1 year ago (12 children)

My biggest issue with Lemmy is lack of userbase... which is fixable by signing up for Lemmy.

Figured best case scenario other people make the switch, worst case I'll forget this service even exists.

Also does anyone know how to enable dark mode, or if there is a dark mode?

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[–] [email protected] 36 points 1 year ago (9 children)

I think there's truth to some of the "not ready" claims... and this is coming from someone who really tried to get into Lemmy, ended up creating their own instance (as demonstrated by my user handle).

A few issues I think Lemmy dev team really need to address ASAP, from least technical (thus affecting most users) to more technical (this affecting less users) are:

1. UX/Discoverability -- Finding communities are a huge pain in the backend right now, and with multiple communities on different instances serving same purpose (i.e.: [email protected] and [email protected]). Sure, Reddit had same issues (the example I've heard is /r/meirl and /r/me_irl), but Reddit offered solution (multi on old reddit, community+community on new reddit). There must be a way to streamline it with meta-communities or lists on Lemmy such that the contents can be viewed in a unified fashion. I recommended !community@ (note the lack of domain) to streamline all of user's subscriptions with same name on different instances as an example; and perhaps we can use #[email protected] for users's maintained lists to unify [[email protected]](/c/[email protected]), [[email protected]](/c/[email protected]), [[email protected]](/c/[email protected]), etc.).

2. Trigger happy defederation hubs -- a certain instance has unceremoniously de-federated a couple of other larger instances. This is not the way, but here we are, with users on those instances not able to access the broader Fediverse, and vice versa. Until discoverability gets taken care of, it will be challenging for users to find a good home -- this leads to next point:

3. Authentication -- The Fediverse at large needs to separate authentication out from instances. Instances may provide their own authentication, fine, but there needs to be better way to authenticate against something else other than an entire new instance of Lemmy. The ActivityPub protocol has clear definitions on what is an actor, and users shouldn't need to deploy a Lemmy instance to identify themselves, separately from a Mastadon instance to identify themselves, separately from a... etc. This is because frankly...

4. Deployment of Lemmy is utter garbage. The official documentation's getting started guide gets users setup with an instance where the UI container cannot talk to public, but the lemmy backend can? Why bother shipping an nginx container if the backend will just expose itself to the whole wide net? Also, let's just pretend postgres container isn't open to the whole world with a basic password... Trying to get it up and running with Traefik was a pain, just do a quick Google and see how many people have asked and gave up, as well as how many different ways people have tried to go at it (something something xkcd 927; I've contributed to a new one of my own per linked post on top!), and the dev basically just straight up going 'we don't support traefik'... also, each approach is not without problems...

5. Federation is a bitch. I am pretty proud of the way I've used override to not edit original docker compose, and locked my setup down a little. But, I'm not ready to have the instance open to the whole wide web without CloudFlare in front... but allegedly, Federation doesn't work with CloudFlare... why? Good luck trying to get to even a popular sub's scale without getting hit with DDOS when someone disagrees with something someone else posted.

There's many more problems, and I genuinely want Lemmy to work. But, Lemmy is, lack of better words, "not yet ready" for prime time. It is thrown into the spotlight with Mastadon (which feels a bit more mature, at least from reading the docs) because of bad leadership at mega techs... It will take a lot of work for Lemmy to evolve and mature, before it can be "ready" to really absorb the mass of Redditors leaving Reddit.

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[–] [email protected] 36 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Lemmy is pretty dense to a newcomer, especially one who is used to the centralized web. But that's okay - we don't need Lemmy to replace Reddit. Just like Mastodon, this 'temporary exodus' is only beneficial for this platform.

Even when the drama 'blows over' and Reddit is back to its usual status, we will have gained a huge amount of new users interested in a decentralized web. As long as there are enough users for Lemmy, I think that's okay.

[–] LizardKing15 25 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Being a niche place without a million American teenagers is better anyway.

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Neoliberals and saying "there is no alternative", name a more iconic duo

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (1 children)

"Don't attribute malice when you can attribute stupidity."

I would not be surprised at all if that user was not aware of which instance they opened or tried after opening join-lemmy.org. Many people are not very mindful or thorough or intentional in how they use technology or software or services. They probably do not even know what an instance is - and so linked the lemmy website.

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Of course there’s no viable alternatives to Reddit. Why would someone create another dumpster fire?

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[–] joshthetechie 19 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think the majority of those people just don't care and are against change.

I can say that to the non-technical person, Lemmy would be a bit confusing due to having to pick a server. However, once you get past that point, Lemmy is a perfectly viable alternative to Reddit, as long as the user base remains active.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Some subreddits are also using automod to remove comments linking to Lemmy.

I hope journalists will put a spotlight on the deceptive tactics Reddit is using.

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[–] BackOnMyBS 17 points 1 year ago

My two cents: good! Let the shitty people stay on reddit. I'm loving the respectful communities here on lemmy, and don't really want those clowns coming over and messing it up for us.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (11 children)

The people who like it are here. The people that don't are still there. Not that complicated.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

I came here to look to see if this topic was covered. I just checked my mod queue and every single post made by my automod OR other users about Lemmy was reported multiple times for "harassment" with 40+ down votes as well. I've literally never had a full mod queue that was more than 6 things before and I had 30 or more posts to approve with 3 being actual things. What the fuck.

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[–] Soltros 16 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Just seems like insecurity. Reddit has some staying power but when the people who do free work don't wanna do free work anymore, it all starts to crumble.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Dunno if you were around then, but people on Digg acted the same way toward Reddit before Digg crashed.

If we stay on this platform and continue to grow and create content, then when Reddit again does something to annoy its years (they probably will), we can be here to take advantage.

The downside is that every great growth in users will affect the platform/site culture, not always for the better. It depends on the users and the size of the migration.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's too tiring going back and forth with these types of Reddit users. I gave up and just chill here

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago

Reddit is known for it's use of bots. Bots helped Reddit grow in its early days. I'm not surprised that bots are being used now. As more people leave, I'm sure more bots will get used to give the impression of an active community. Just lie they did in those early days.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Trolls will troll. I for one am not going to hold my breath for people to switch over. I do feel that you have to be at least a little bit dedicated and willing to give up some convenient features of a platform that has been heavily developed for 10 plus years to make the switch. That is going to cause some vitriol, there is just no way around it. I'm not even mad at it to be honest.

At the end of the day, all I wanted was to have a place to talk to strangers on the internet without seeing ads in good faith. And thanks to Lemmy we have that. I personally don't care if Lemmy "wins" or whatever. People have to choose to participate. And they are! But millions aren't going to make the switch all at once.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (2 children)

No, I wouldn't notice because I don't use reddit anymore.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (19 children)

As a tech savy person, I can confidently say lemmy is not a viable reddit alternative at this stage for an arbitrary reddit user. The UI and clients are just terrible and full of small bugs, annoyances and inconsistencies. Sure, it will eventually get there, but negative opinions about lemmy are not completely unmerrited. Just as I'm typing this, I get screen tears and flickering elements. It's just very, very bleeding edge and I can absolutely see how someone trying it for 5 minutes would be turned off. If you want to capture the masses, the user experience has to impeccable.

PS: my first try at submitting this response timed out. This is my second try.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

It doesn't have to be impeccable. It doesn't need corporations to buy ads. It just has to keep getting better and not die. Look at Linux. It never did overtake MacOS & Windows on desktops. But it keeps getting better and it didn't die and it took over server rooms. Look at Mastodon. It's nowhere near as popular as Twitter and maybe never will be, but it's 5 years old and is steadily growing. I like hanging out there. Oak trees start as acorns.

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