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qznc

https://join-lemmy.org/

Lemmy is a federated Reddit clone. It already works and is available. As far as I know currently the best alternative.

Please, join a smaller instance currently. The biggest ones are already overloaded.

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I wish there was something else.

For building a coherent community federation is a bug not a feature.

Federation makes it easier for users to join. If you don’t need that, there are plenty self-hosted alternatives. For example, HN itself.

How exactly? Ever federated project has all this faff about "which instance should I use?". How is that possibly easier.44

Just join one. Portability is inherent to the software. If you don't like it, move to another one.

Yea, extra steps. Confusion. Uncertainty. The exact opposite of easier.

Registering for a website is not something most people find so mystifying. Short of being willfully obtuse, I would imagine most people who express discontent with online communities could exert the most cursory of efforts to understand how to do it. Typically it involves visiting a URL and then typing in an email address and a password. Please pass this on if you come across anyone struggling to comprehend it.

Getting into a federated space brings a lot of questions for normal people. Why this instance? Why not this instance? Can I only join one? What if my friends join a different one? This one only has 100 people, is it weird if I join? This one has 1,000,000 million, isn't that basically Reddit/Twitter/whatever?

These are the sorts of questions that come to mind for normal people. By the time they've asked this pile of questions they've already decided it's not worth the hassle of finding the answers

As people positioned to understand this stuff, we have a duty to explain it to people if we believe it will have a positive impact on society. I'm not oblivious to the fact that lots of people have lots of questions about decentralised social media, I'm saying the answers can be very simple. That should be enough to realise that the fatalism some people seem to experience in the face of this new technology only exposes their own intellectual laziness -- not the confusion of "normal people" and not the insurmountable complexity of that technology.

Here is how the comparison looks to me: Assume you are a HN user and you heard about this interesting lobsters community.

Case 1: Different website, create an account there.

Case 2: ActivityPub vision, search for !lobsters, click join

Case 3: ActivityPub now, go to website, copy URL into your own instance, search returns nothing, try again minutes later, join.

I fully agree that Lemmy is currently not easier (case 3). Users understand multiple accounts (case 1) but managing accounts, they do not. I belief eventually the Fediverse will be easiest (case 2).

The political views of some of the major developers (tankie, pro-china, castro-profile-picture communists) has put me off lemmy, particularly because they're (allegedly) removing anything critical of Russia/China and promoting genocide denial on their instance.

Whenever someone complains that a certain project or community harbors toxicity or right-wing views, the standard answer on HN is that should't matter, software should be judged strictly on technical merit, not politics.

So start up your own instance with blackjack and hookers if you like, federate with whomever you want.

The "standard answer" is to swallow a poison pill. The legacy is problematic and cannot be separated from.

But, then, HN trends Utilitarian in the extreme, with its Libertarian roots.

I've heard of more politically neutral instances like beehaw.org - places like that might fit you better.

There's also kbin, which is a newer alternative to Lemmy (and possibly less political?).

No. It is developed and run by tankies. This is a poison pill. See https://mstdn.social/@feditips/106835057054633379

Lemmy is evil because the devs host lemmy.ml and it links to the lemmygrad.ml instance which is evil? Too indirect an argument for me.

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