Memorial to "rif is fun for Reddit" Android app, aka "reddit is fun", shut down after June 30, 2023
Honestly never liked Twitter so mastodon was like meh. But as dorky as it sounds Reddit was fun, even went to some of the meetups back in the day when it was smaller, etc. I’m now seeing the light on the federated / dWeb scene more clearly now.
Totally agree we need a new grassroots web. The classic internet is way too centralized now and is about to become a pit of GPT-generated nonsense clogging up search engines. Stoked to jump in and support these new communities!
It doesn't seem like an issue yet, but I'm interested to see how the fediverse combats the inevitable GPT spam it'll start receiving as it grows and misinformation/advertising becomes more attractive on these platforms. It's not an easy problem to solve (though handling it better than Elon should be pretty easy lmao).
Since you mentioned Twitter and GPT, I'm also not very much of a Twitter guy, but I open it sometimes just because.
Jesus Christ, EVERY POST is filled with lots of people just quoting the GPT bots to "answer" for them some ironic shit. People can't even be bothered to even interact with a post of their interest anymore.
The real reddit migration has started! the blackout migration was nothing to what's going on right now!
Is that really true? I navigated to the Reddit page just a minute ago and there is a ton of activity in the subs I was using before I deleted my account. There are new communities on here that were created to mimic subs over there and it's pretty telling: Little to no activity on the communities over here but a lot of activity on the Reddit subs that are being mimicked. I'm asking myself if the people that are leaving Reddit are mostly tech people, that either work in an industry related to technology or are super enthusiastic about tech. My go-to subs were humanities related on Reddit. Those are still super active over there.
I support Lemmy but people saying Reddit is dead as of today and everyone is moving over is just way to hopeful or straight up delusional. If Lemmy does take off it will be years before it reaches anywhere near the amount of users Reddit has. Most of the people who said they will leave Reddit also won't commit.
As far as I'm concerned Reddit is dead(to me) a bit like a bad breakup. They still exist, I might bump into them every now and then, but I'll neither acknowledge its existence nor be interested in staying any longer than required.
And all I have to say is.. enjoy it while it lasts. Once all the users come, so do all the trolls
Yes. I’m one of the many who kept using Reddit throughout the blackout, but once third party apps were killed, I would have to go out of my way to download the official Reddit app and relearn all the muscle memory browsing habits anyway, so why even bother? WefWef is great and I kinda despise the shit a Reddit pulled with their abrupt price hike.
My daily browsing on Reddit went from probably 1-2 hours of day to … well it’s not been long enough to tell but so far I’ve only viewed the site once from my laptop. My mobile use is now completely Lemmy.
In truth if I’m being honest with myself, most posts, even in my beloved communities, were just turning into 90% bot ads; it’s gotten more and more obvious over time and I was ignoring it for so long but Reddit really is a husk if what it was and kinda has been for awhile. As a 12 year user, it’s hard to leave it behind but I’m slowly learning whatever the fuck all this is. Godspeed to everyone here!
It's really, really smart that it looks like Reddit in terms of page layout. It satisfies the brain that likes its patterns and routines. I even put my favorite Lemmy app right where I used to launch from to satisfy the muscle memory. I really hope this sticks.
Same here. I lurked during the blackout, participated on reddit once business went back, and now I have yet to open it on my laptop browser
Same here for the most part. I still browse reddit on my pc occasionally. I used sync for a long time. When they killed 3rd party apps I couldn't bring myself to download the Shit reddit app. Lemmy has replaced reddit on mobile for me. I did 90% of my reddit browsing on mobile, so it's significantly reduced my time there.
I think there is a lot of hype going on here about migrations tbh. Lemmy is cool and all but reddit is certainly still generating/aggregating way more content and its where most lemmy content is originating at this moment. I think for now the tech folks are here setting up, a few of us are bumbling around discovering this, and everyone else is still on reddit. I am not a very techy person myself and lemmy is a weird system to wrap your mind around coming from reddit and I can see how people may not bother, especially this early. Just choosing an instance and then finding communities is like an absolute mindmelter if you're used to reddit and its' easy to see why people on reddit would not be keen to move away.
Honestly there's no reason to not use both if you wish. Just like Lemmy instances, you don't have to choose a single one to base your entire online time around you can have accounts everywhere and enjoy it all.
I will say though there has been a noticeable difference in the discussion quality on Lemmy. I don't get this vibe that everybody is attacking me and looking for opportunities to shit on me when posting on here, which is hella refreshing at least.
Got it. Yea i think the migration is really for the people that use third-party apps and the people that support them. reddit is fine its just how they act toward people who are litterally moderating and giving to the community by using third-party apps. i modded my sub from rif and apollo early on. We realized that u/spez was in total control and realized we couldn't do anything about it. we tried to protest but of course we are little fish. now we got lemmy and kbin. witch is actually better cause you arne't jus stuck to one platoform. yes people are mimicking reddit cause thats all we know. but give it time and we will stop talking about it. i say about 1 month or so. you will still see the people talk about reddit burning in hell lol and stuff but that's about it. the blackout brought out I think the real techies and then after the api yesterday and today closed the reset that used third-party apps and everyone that dosen't like where reddit is going are coming over now. #fediverse is huge and we didn't know about!
Same.. I think as the Lemmy apps mature and if Reddit quality decreases, then we could see more of an exodus. My hope is that apps might make it more accessible. It’s the Wild West.
The ratio of users that I remember Redditors often passed around was ten percent of users were active contributors that created new content and were active everywhere in all the subs. Every sub has a core group of people that create most of the content and drive conversations and connections. The rest of the 90 percent are lurking in the background and most just read and watch, several may take part and generally just repeat and repost content that was already created by someone else.
Once enough of those core dedicated Redditors leave, it will severely affect content. But even so, there is so much content on the site already that users can just repost old stuff endlessly and still drive traffic .... hell they could even just get the bots to just regularly bring up old popular content that users would see as new.
If Reddit does change for the worse, it will take time and it won't happen fast .... it will take months but probably a year or two to see any significant change.
This needs to be the way forward. The community needs to own itself, support itself, etc. The alternative is what just happened where the community is abused for someone else's gain.
I agree to a point, but this is also how you get communities that are REALLY easy to squash. Because they're fragile and incoherent. Bad actors can easily overwhelm them, astroturf, go after hosting....etc and small self funded communities won't have the manpower, tools, or resources to combat it.
You want to build a strong community that lasts, and is resilient.
So how do we make our communities more resilient, well resourced, less fragmented, and also accessable for member growth?
One of my biggest concerns about Lemmy is the seeming inability to prevent astroturfing by various groups. I also wonder how it will survive when (not if) they receive GDPR fines, legal holds from law enforcement organizations, and a variety of other legal and regulatory topics that Lemmy (or at least the instance owner) is subject to even if the user base doesn’t believe that to be the case.
Hopefully the donation model will allow enough funding to address the realities of running a popular service.
About the "less fragmented" part.
I don't see how that is possible in the fediverse.
Let's say I like fishing and a fishing community exists in five instances... That fragmentation you can't avoid... In the other hand it helps with the resilient part I guess. The more fragmented it is the harder it will be to take a community down.
Having multiple communities under the same subject in different instances will soon become normal, for better or for worse.
I have read some comments in github discussing possible ways to develop something akin to "mutireddits" (or more recently custom feeds) so people can group communities like this across different instances.
Let's see how all this plays out. Interesting times ahead in the fediverse.
That makes me think having something like "federated communities" could be neat, where a community on one instance could opt in to have content mirrored/visible from a community in another instance. In practice it would be something like subscribing to a community on one instance essentially being equivalent to subscribing to multiple communities on different instances, but if there is disagreement on e.g. moderation practices moderators might decide to "defederate" the communities.
I’m on Lemmy.world and just moved my Mastodon account to Mastodon.world. Both run by Ruud!
So now my Patreon donation goes to the same dev for all my social media needs. Pretty sweet!
Discourage people from using karma. You actually can turn off scores in your settings.
If any instance decides to put advertising on itself, leave immediately and get everyone else to do the same.
Just out of curiosity, what is your argument against using karma?
Karma is an inherently destructive thing for many reasons. For people, it is a representation of other people's approval of you, so they'll do anything to boost that number as highly as possible, even going so far as to make fake karma farming accounts, create botnets to upvote themselves and downvote opponents in arguments, and post garbage content instead of engaging in meaningful conversation with other people. For corporations, it's a marketing tool they can exploit to manipulate public opinion, by creating or buying high-karma accounts to convince people to buy shit, or to mass downvote people who point out flaws in their arguments or products, or figure out what they're planning and try to call them on it. They can use karma to discredit opponents, astroturf, and even sway elections indirectly. It's one of the reasons why civil and political discourse have completely collapsed in the USA.
That list is not exhaustive
A big part of the problem that led to bot spam and karma farming wasn't the existence of karma but the fact that most of Reddit treated karma as a proxy for legitimacy, so it was often used for Reddit accounts that were going to be sold off for astroturfing purposes.
I've always followed the old reddiquette: if the comment is contributing to the discussion, upvote it. Even if you disagree with it. Reddiquette used to be a big part of reddit, but stopped maybe 10 years ago
Out of curiosity, how will Lemmy pay for itself is it continues to grow? What's the long term plan? Donations?
It works for wikipedia, and that's a big, monolithic organization. The distributed nature of Lemmy makes it more possible to run off donations, because individual instances are smaller and require less exotic hardware. They don't have to store the entire corpus of Lemmy content, etc, etc. Smaller instances means less human resources and attendant management. I think most of these instances are still run by volunteers as passion projects.
I don't think that will work as instances start getting to the million user mark. 10M... I'm interested to see 1) if Lemmy actually gets that big and 2) if users condense on one or a handful of super-instances or some other form of organization develops.
I can imagine, for example, Electronic Arts starting their own instance for arms-length game sites that might attract a large swath of people, or Nikon sponsoring an instance that specializes in photography and imaging-related communities.
Lemmy is awesome! It’s actually pretty intuitive once you understand what’s going on.
I agree wholeheartedly. I am curious on how instances will deal with overfunding. And where there’s profit, there’s capitalism.
Second option is difficult because there are too many instances. It is difficult to make good use of the funds as the popular instances will eventually enjoy too much profit whilst the smaller instances will be forced to shutdown due to lack of funds. This will lessen the decentralisation overtime.
The solution is a central service, something like Lemmy Fund Management or something, which regulates the funds accordingly. The managers will be selected by voting system (democracy). There are other solutions as well.
But then the centralised service becomes a single point of failure. If you attack that one service, all instances lose their funding.
Unsure how distributed federated services prevents the reddit downfall, aside from corporate greed. Which can also be solved through legally binding agreements/foundation-controlled companies. Among many other solutions that can avoid funding, stability, and consistency issued federated services have and will continue to have.
It's all a tradeoff. To tradeoff corporate greed you now have community fragmentation and fragility risks as any instance can be taken down whenever, and any unhappy user that created communities can solely kill them off (As stated by some users threatening to do so in another thread).
What you should be talking about is how do you mitigate these tradeoffs. What should others do to make the fediverse more successful? If you want it to be successful than talking about these hard problems in a semi-flenal way is required.
#2 sounds good to say, but barely works in practice when you're talking about infrastructure costs in the tens of millions of $ per year for something at scale...
Essentially saying nice things that don't effectively translate into reality doesn't solve problems. It just perpetuates a lack of critical thinking.
Newbie here, how can we support the hosting with our own funds? And how we can be sure it's used as intended?
For lemmy.world, they are using their previous setup used for mastodon.world: https://opencollective.com/mastodonworld
As for how you can be sure, it is hard to tell, it really depends on each instance. Even in the case of lemmy.world, while you have some details on the expenses and revenues, it's not at the level of a company audit. But that was enough for me to donate. At some point there will always be a trust element.
My entire community is down right now here on Lemmy. Is that because of the Reddit migration? Like, it's there but all the posts have disappeared.
Yes.
Source: currently migrating from reddit and here to suffocate your servers
It's so weird to be on the recieving end of the "Reddit hug of death" for a change.