/r/startrek/ migrates to lemmy
old.reddit.com
old.reddit.com
I spent a decade+ actively on reddit, and I truly loved its hobby & local communities during that time. I deleted my account last week; I don't believe they'll change. Life is too short to spend it on things you don't love anymore.
Once I started to consider (because it's been pointed out) that Reddit outsourced their moderation to community volunteers this "fediverse" thing started to make more sense in principle. To use analogy phrasing I learned in school: "federations" is to "subreddits" as "fediverse" is to "reddit".
I've heard of, e.g., Mastodon having performance issues, even in a way that could be maliciously exploited, but that's in the implementation details. The theory seems rather sound for future internet communities. It's exciting in a certain way; it feels like the birth of a new internet.
One thing that annoys me about Mastodon is that the medium amplifies angry toots, particularly about politics. I don't want to read anything where anybody active after 1945 is accused to be "a Nazi" or "a fascist" for instance.
Because there are so many toots to read I have no problems losing some toots so if the model rejects some stuff because it is about a topic that people frequently write angry toots about that's fine with me.
My smart RSS reader YOShInOn is already classifying 2000 articles on a good day, one of these days I have to update it so it can train more than one classification model. I'm pretty sure my model would work OK for angry toots if I can collect 5000 or so them which might be a lot to bear.
An advantage of content-based filtering trained by the individual (as opposed to a corporation) is that it will not be so controversial because the people being filtered won't know that it happened. Someone on mastodon pointed out that this doesn't give backpressure for people to improve their behavior
https://mastodon.social/@UP8/110526769345483257
but
That is maybe 5% of the people who that N-word gets applied to. Mostly it is an attempt at dehumanization that follows very much the playbook of Herr Hitler himself. If the antics of the occasional Nazi cosplayer get blocked that is not collateral damage, it is a very good thing even if it off target. That stuff gets amplified so much that somebody else is likely to show up to counterprotest and pelt them with a bag of little bolts (a tactic that the Spartacus League used to great effect when the KKK showed up in Auburn, NY.)
fear and denial will drive them to build garden walls when they should be transforming to stay ahead of obsolescence. turning into tiktok is fad chasing and a means to end of times, destruction, and relegation to has been status. myspace and tumblr realized too latomethi/ng e, and their transformations were never positioned to restore former glory.
what i would like to see is federation separate itself into three components. identify, client, server. the identity system should be divorced from the other two components and allow me to sign into any server. (as much as typing this next sentence will lose some people, public blockchains are a good way to store identity, where different servers can collaborate to host a unified identity database.) anyone should be able to use any client with any server. adding servers to my client should be no harder than an rss subscription. my configuration, my subscriptions should be stored with my identity, (not in an instance) and instantly portable to new clients. having an identity protocol, many client vendors, and multiple standardized server implementations will create something long lasting and resilient. the firms who choose that path will be the leaders.
how could reddit monetize this? run an identity server, have a direct messaging path to customers. fracture and make many competing clients for different peoplebases and community types. some free, some not. build an open source server backend and go the redhat model, selling enterprise support to large firms that want to host a community, and sell development services to honor feature requests from those customers.
(i know the fediverse is close to a lot of this, but the way identity is tied to instance isnt something i see as ideal. a lack of nomadic identity / identity portability makes the fediverse as fragile as any other centralized site. the fediverse being grafted onto existing dns, and having identity owned by a specific downstream host is problematic. identity should be distributed above the dns layer, not below cnames. the same applies to communities not being able to push themselves to new instances in an .. instant. serving of data is too centralized, and a p2p cdn layer /ipfs would help. the instance and the client seem too closely tied together as well. the way i see the current instances is the opposite of portability. im sure there is a lot of fast moving development going on, and hope someone can correct me. top answer here is a bit of a dealbreaker https://www.reddit.com/r/Mastodon/comments/134oud8/are_there... and where a blockchain ecosystem could help.)
It's not at all evident the world actually desires a better internet.
Even without corporate involvement, it's extremely obvious that a subreddit's size is inversely proportionate to the quality of its content and discourse (with perhaps extremely rare exceptions)
In other words, when the "normies" start flooding something, the value of that takes a nosedive, because experts don't want to fight another battle on top of the battle of producing good content (which is hard enough by itself).
> I spent a decade+ actively on reddit
I've spent roughly ~5-6 active years, but then the combination of censorship and nosedive in quality of discourse that started ~2015, made me lose all interest in actively participating.
Much like any true decentralized system, there can be as many star trek communities as there are trekkies. But this is not a technical problem, it's a social problem: when wanting to discuss, they will naturally converge towards the same space(s). If there are multiple, that's not a problem, just like it's not a problem to have multiple linux distributions. Each space will have its rules, its technical background. You can be part of both.
This situation can't be solved with technical tools, only with a human consensus. That's as good as it gets.
edit: i've just now noticed that I can click the label under the title to copy the text that I can then paste into lemmy.world search.
There should be something like a chrome extension that captures lemmy links and redirects them to the lemmy instance that i have an account on.
We are slowly approaching the limits of web browsing, where the document and the application are intertwined. We are limited by the tools at hand, unfortunately.
That's great! A community should have interesting discussion, not engagement!
Software wise (Lemmy/Kbin/etc), it's definitely not for the faint of heart currently but that will improve in time. For me though the biggest thing is "One platform to rule them all" is not viable. It will have issues, users will suffer, and this isn't some unique thing we've never seen before.
The more quickly we can regain some aspect of "the web" in favor of users, the better. In my book.
I'm venturing into ActivityPub myself, though focused on UX of link Aggs, mostly. One issue i've seen so far with Mastodon/etc, is that AP works decently for cheap stuff, but expensive stuff like Images and Video still have significant cost. I believe with Mastodon it's all hosted from the source location. Ie you run `tinymastoinstance.com` and one of your "Toots" with videos/images goes viral in federated instances, i think pretty much everyone is pulling the image from your instance. Not sure how much they try to federate the heavy stuff.
Hypothetically they can of course.. but i'm just not sure what the AP spec says about that. It's of significant concern to me, though, since i'm wanting to build software for micro-AP instances and hotlinking files on a micro instance will almost assuredly burn the instance down.
Facebook on the otherhand though, seems totally viable. Identity duplication is probably the biggest issue AP has with a more identify focused application like Facebook. Notably as i learned the other day there's nothing in the AP spec for persisting identities across instances. No private key you can reuse on new instances to identify yourself as the same user, etc.
Did you hear about federation?
I feel like we're not getting nearly as many /r/startrek jokes as we should be at this point.
I don't think that's much different than reddit itself tbh. So many subreddits splinter into "Foo"/"TrueFoo"/"TrollFoo"/"Foojerk" etc as it is, as groups have fights and run off. Often the original "Foo" is dead, with no tombstone marker to the real active subreddit. Lemmy and kbin will involve a lot of the same, with just different instances with their own "Foo" instead of "xxFooXX".
This isn't some "migrate from walled garden A to walled garden B", this is the community setting up new-age phpBB except it's federated and interoperates with any and all ActivityPub.
You can subscribe to /r/startrek from your Twitter account. You can add people on Twitter and blogs to your Reddit feed. If this ends up not succeeding I wouldn't gloat because this is the endgame us tech nerds have asked for forever.
This just isn't going to fly. I have literally hundreds of subscribed subs on Reddit - I'm not going to a different site for each.
Your "frontpage" on whatever server you choose to call home is the amalgam of all the content you follow everywhere.
Edit: Currently, on my 1900x1200 monitor I can see ALMOST 6 posts on the default landing page.
On the one hand, I have had lots of good constructive talks with people there over the years.
On the other hand, I don't want to follow those mods over to lemmy. Over the last few years they have gotten heavy handed with the temp-bans for anyone that doesn't fall in line with their excessively positive views of Trek. Which has not only resulted in some quality conversation being completely removed from the sub, but started to make the sub feel like a shill for CBS/Paramount.
WOW! It was incredibly responsive. What the heck? That was so weird, there was no delay in clicking.
I didn't even realize this was a thing until it was so fast that I came here to talk about it.
Not going to speculate, just impressed.
Lemmy's frontend uses the React-like InfernoJS library that claims to be faster than React however I really doubt it's frontend rendering that is the bottleneck here.
You mean this? https://lemmy.world/communities/listing_type/All/page/1
https://old.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/149cq9f/reddit_were...
This was never going to work. Mods should have used this moment to get paid (percentage of ad revenue generated by the sub they moderate), not throw a tantrum about API access.
People still use MySpace after all.
Over time, the newbies will start to realize that they're using a hollowsite and start looking for more substance, and they'll come find us wherever we happen to be.
1: You didn't quote what I said, you quoted what you felt like I said. 2: Your wording is ambiguous. It could read as either reddit has already won and there is no use fighting it (which is some malarkey) or that wherever the people gather to have the conversations that they used to have on reddit.com will become reddit (which is weird but ok)
Which one do you mean? Malarkey or Weird?
Edit:
from https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html:
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
This isn't Reddit, we can both do better. I'm sorry.
There simply isn't a good enough open alternative to reddit at the moment from most users perspectives.
People openly talk about this as the reason that HackerNews continues to be such a vibrant community.
Replacing the mods will change the community, full stop. Could be for the better , could be for the worse.
Conversely, the mods can also be mercurial and act like little tyrants over the subreddit. /r/StarTrek in particular is known for stifling criticism around 'new trek' and spinoff subreddits like /r/DaystromInstitute were created by people tired of the mods' actions.
It also raises an interesting question as to why the mods have so much power in the first place and if any community recourse should exist when subscribers do not like the mods' actions. For one thing it does seem weird that the mods of r/StarTrek are allowed to unilaterally close the subreddit.
I also don't think mods should be able to turn /r subs private. The private subs should be on a different path like /p. If you turn a /r sub private then it converts to /p and the /r subname becomes available again.
I suspect that some reform around private subs will be instituted in the near-ish future since it is the primary tool used by mods in the boycott.
Reddit should be removing these mods, adding new ones, and reopening subs. Mods shouldn't get to hold entire communities hostage when they throw a tantrum.
Anyone can moderate a subreddit, these mods aren't special and they're completely replaceable. They should be reminded of this.
> they’re completely replaceable
Not really. The pool of people both willing to do the above and are any good at keeping the peace is pretty finite
Above is why I stopped being a mod. It’s a pretty thankless task
They have far more power than regular users, they are by definition some of the most privileged users on the site. If a mod makes a decision that's it for regular users, there's nothing they can do about it.
> It’s a pretty thankless task
Reddit mods have earned their reputation. It's not surprising it's not only thankless, but generally despised.
You're volunteering?
It's hard to get a real idea how much support there is amongst the user base.
I standby what I said though, mods shouldn't have the power to take away entire communities.
Any 'big fish in a small pond' personality type who gets a kick out of exercising what little power they have. There is generally no shortage of people signing up for that position
A sub like /r/startrek is going to be popular by default. That's why people are squatting on subs like /r/ps8 right now even though a PlayStation 8 is probably 20 years away from being an actual product.
There are instances where reddit has given other users control of a sub because the mods were MIA. There is a whole subreddit where people request to be given mod rights for inactive subs - /r/redditrequest.
This was happening well before the boycott.
Like, sure, university libraries are "owned" by the school, but one can generally reliably treat them as "public."
They've also been neutering/breaking the mobile version of the site for years trying to force people to use the Reddit mobile app.
It's writing a new chapter in your internet story.
Granted this had to do with the fact that unlike any other agreed upon standard protocol, Reddit posts are not accessible except by indirect means, i.e. you can’t download the contents of a community the same way you would with a git repository or an email server and migrate it elsewhere.
Tangentially, https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/12ucc9z/downlo... and https://old.reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/c93rdt/how_do_i_...
A sibling comment mentions ArchiveTeam, which ends up in the Wayback Machine. Some work to be done around tools to make that corpus more readily available for consumption and perhaps backfill. Lots of existing tooling to query the Internet Archive's CDX servers to understand what coverage looks like and retrieve archived content.
They could probably import the data to lemmy.
I love how you can simply subscribe to communities in other instances!
There are some weird issues though. Sorting by Activity is like old skool forum activity where posts are pushed to the top even if they just receive new comments, which has some topics remain on top for days.
And sort by Hot which is more like Reddit is apparently bugged right now and freezes too often.
I recommend sort by “Todays top” until at least Lemmy 0.18.
I think what's needed is a decoupled account management solution that roams across all (federated) lemmy instances. You need to be able to log in once and interact everywhere (instead of manually copying URLs from one instance into another just to load the community).
Even if you're just a lurker, you want to bookmark, save, and maybe upvote / downvote. If you're an active contributor (even if the UX issues are fixed) you'd put all your trust into whoever manages the instance where you originally signed up from (startrek.website) to keep it around (and to protect your data). For me, that's a blocker. Sure, I'll create throwaway accounts to shitpost but that's not "building community" (think 4chan instead of reddit).
This is huge, hopefully more communities migrate away from Reddit. That platform got way too big for it's britches. Just don't move to Discord, Discord is terrible.
The major problem Reddit has and will always have is "power moderators". Losers with nothing else to do but become janitors and impose their will on very large forums. Imposing their politics, their culture, their sensibilities on 100+ subreddits.
I remember there was one site that had regular moderator elections and cycles baked into it's system. Whatever the solution is, it ain't Reddit.
I agree. Wikipedia has the same problem, with possibly even larger impact.
I've already described an easy fix to retain every single bit of that knowledge elsewhere: make links to individual topics followable from the web and from search, even if the sub has gone private.
Easy. Fixes 100% of the issues regarding knowledge lost. Mods retain their power over sub visibility for new content but get their balls cut off when it comes to the freedom of knowledge.
I 'host' a community on my lemmy instance? People can submit 'stories' for my community if it's problematic I can essentially refuse that story? If someone comments on one of those stories, do I as a community admin/owner can remove that comment? If there is a shithead user who's account belongs to another lemmy instance I assume I can ban them from interacting with any content hosted in my community, same with another lemmy server out there if there is a whole server of shitheads?
> You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !startrek@startrek.website
The phrasing of the paragraph implies, to me, that putting !startrek@startrek.website in search on my instance is an alternative to signing up and logging in.
I tried on my social.librem.one search, nothing found. Is that me misunderstanding how it works? A missing feature on librem.one? Something else?
If that's not an alternative to signing up and I have to create a new account on every new Lemmy thing, there's just no way this platform is ever replacing Reddit.
Maybe nobody will use it, but some people probably will, people who don't give a shit about stupid Internet wars and just want to read about and discuss things Star Trek.
...which, believe it or not, is most people. Mod wars are uninteresting to the 90% who don't even make accounts.
The reinstated reddit sub will very quickly overtake the Lemmy sub in activity. Many of the posters who went to Lemmy will slowly migrate back to reddit. The mods will have lost their "power" over a very popular subreddit with nothing to show for it.
That's how the mod wars end. Many mods will voluntarily end the boycott once it becomes clear that there thousands of people who will happily take their place.
Maybe Reddit throws them a bone by allowing an exception for Apollo and a few other popular third party clients so the mods can save face (or maybe not).
If dang did poorly enough for long enough, he'd be replaced (or they'd shut HN down).
Also, there isn't nearly as much special about HN as some people seem to think. It's prone to every one of the same issues Reddit has, the incentives are just aligned differently for dang.
I'm not going to install reddit's official app.
Oh, I don't see evidence of that. At best this looks like the *mods* of /r/startrek are making that vow.
- Decide that you don't want third-party apps.
- Buy out all the big players (Apollo, etc.) and integrate some of their tooling into your own app/core.
I understand it would have cost a lot of money, but they could have found a middle-ground where everyone is happy. Instead, they're throwing a stupid tantrum that could end up costing them a lot more than it would have cost them to solve it the more traditional way.
Stinks like incompetence and lack of awareness to me.
"Incompetence and lack of awareness" is what you get when management starts taking their community for granted.
* Want to scrape all of reddit for your fucking ML nightmare, that will be 1 billion dollars.
* Want to write a reddit 3rd party app without serving reddit's ads? Thats some price point.
* Want to write a reddit 3rd party app and display within some parameters the ads they place into the api feed? Thats cheaper than no ad serving.
* Just a personal api project maybe to help admin your sub or help you in some other way. Free under some kind of reasonable rate limit.
Did they style this for nostalgia?
Given that a large proportion of Reddit users are likely not technical I think Lemmy will have a hard job of attracting and keeping those users. Maybe that’s by design I don’t know.
Would it hurt to have a designer look over it?
I know there are tons of discord servers, but for older posts etc, it all seems to get lost in the stream.
So there's no homepage with all my subscriptions?
This is not a valid replacement unless we're going to bring back RSS and start up a local reader again that can somehow auto-create accounts and re-submit comments.
I feel like there really needs to be a browser extension that does the appropriate redirects to make this problem go away. It's a really bad UX rn.
You have a top secret ultra elite experimental ship with a spore drive... with what? Something something tardigrades?
But then your crew is a criminal, cadet Tilly?, everyone is unstable/untrustworthy, and a rather high concentration of LGBT people?
But you get banned for pointing this out.
Was it for not liking Discovery, or being an a-hole about it? I didn't and don't like Discovery, I was pretty clear and precise in how I expressed that opinion. I saw many others shared it. I never got banned, and never stopped seeing people disparaging Discovery.
Basically on Discovery, people seemed not treat the ship as a workplace, and there was no emergency too critical to not interrupt it with an extended and heartfelt, emotionally cathartic interaction. But the level of vitriol people would bring to their feelings about that show was often very off-putting and quite unfamiliar.
I also mentioned cadet and criminal, each of these attributes are separate entities.
You are the one associating untrustworthy with LGBT. Which in fact isn't the case.
I am referring to Voq / Ash Tyler who is untrustworthy because he's a klingon mole. I don't believe he is LGBT? OR Captain Lorca who was mirror universe and implicitly untrustworthy? Also not LGBT as far as I know.
As a trans person, I don't believe I would ever associate unstable or untrustworthy and LGBT. But alas here I am being downvoted for this.
No, the original commenter made that association implicit by listing the proportional presence of LGBT as a detractor alongside criminals and untrustworthy crewmembers.
More likely they will migrate to r/starwars2 when users are fed up with this moderator madness
i'm hoping all of my favorite subs move over and I can restrict my reddit usage to searching through archives for stuff.