I really hope a decent Reddit replacement shows up soon; my impression is that HN is mostly webdevs, so surely some of y'all are on it?
The important thing to note – even though you join a particular Lemmy "instance", it doesn't particularly matter which one, because you can subscribe to communities (subreddits) from any instance.
The instance I joined – vlemmy.net
An aggregator of communities to join – https://lemmyverse.net/communities
Sadly limiting instances like mastodon can do isn't available in lemmy or kbin afaik, so highly moderated instances like beehaw are resorting to complete disconnection (defederation) for now until moderation tooling improves.
One caveat about the current implementations is that a defederated instance doesn't seem to know it's been defederated from, so a stale copy of the remote content still exists and can be interacted with (users can post in the remote community that defederated and comment on stale posts, or even new posts in the remote community that are made by local users, however none of that will get synced to the remote communities / instance that defederated).
https://www.jayeless.net/2023/06/on-reddit-and-alternatives....
> There’s just no way I could feel comfortable in a community that supports the right-wing nationalist Putin’s war on Ukraine, or outright denies the harsh repression meted out against Muslims in China.
Which makes up 50% of the article, to "it's slightly different than reddit"?
Alternative implementations would probably help as well. Kbin seems to be one. Given the sudden recent interest, perhaps we'll see more before long.
What's interesting is that Reddit isn't really a single community - Each individual subreddit has it's own moderators, editorial voice, group of people, etc. They can each move independently.
For example, /r/startrek and the related startrek websites have all moved to https://startrek.website
This federates with Lemmy, kbin, etc - So if a user posts to startrek.website it shows up everyone else's servers, and people can reply from whatever federated site they use
I've been building a platform called Sociables which is intentionally not just a Reddit clone. We are trying to create an all-in-one place for people to create communities and not just posts.
Here's an example of a community:
Just think, one of Reddit's features for years was the "trending subreddits" list. Someone made that, someone else approved it. It got put on the front page, it became a core part of the experience. There were meetings!! Meetings where this was discussed. It was an OKR, maybe even of multiple people, was there a whole team?
But you and I understand that the essence of community is that you get a small group of people who interact and re-interact and who get used to seeing each other and who have fun doing this thing, whether it's shitposting memes or discussing God or something else. You grow past a certain size and now you are shouting into the void, which is the same experience you have every day, just go to your local pub and shout your hilarious comments at the TV and you'll have more listeners than your comments on a large subreddit.
"Trending subreddits," people literally came into daily stand-up, "Hi Jessica, how is the 'suddenly destroy Reddit communities just when they start growing and thereby make Reddit suck more' feature going?" "Well I ran into some roadblocks as the sudden influx of new users makes the statistics very hard to pull, I'm thinking of changing to a cron job that reassembles the list every hour." "Jessica, we've talked about this, making Reddit suck more is of top priority to my manager and my director, I don't care how you do it, just GET IT DONE and we can get a big bonus at the end of quarter" "I won't let you down, boss! Reddit WILL suck more by the end of this quarter."
I don't think it's still a thing anymore as-is but I don't think it was deleted for the fact that it was the make Reddit suck feature? I think they're still basically doing the same thing but just basically temp-autojoining users into those subreddits, "Reddit wasn't sucking fast enough when people had to opt-in to flashmobbing a promising community, now we're just going to shove the people in the door and scream 'you're a flashmob get to sucking!' and hope that works." More meetings were had on this!
Here's a list of the core community features:
1. Customizable discussion boards. Community owners can setup threaded discussion boards for different topics related to their niche. Say a user creates a community for a niche like "Cars", under that community they could create different discussion boards for sub categories like "Car-mods", "Car-photos", "Car-sales", etc. This is different from Reddit where typically you only have a singular discussion board per community.
2. Voice chatrooms. Community owners can setup Discord style voice chat rooms where users can communicate via voice.
3. Real-time text chatrooms. Currently we only have a singular chatroom for the whole community however we are looking at adding the ability to create multiple rooms per community.
3. Synchronized YouTube/Vimeo player. Community owners can create a playlist of YouTube/Vimeo videos. Their community's player cycles through the playlist and synchronizes the playback so people within the community can watch the same video at the same time.
4. Baked in monetization. Community owners can offer tiered monthly membership subscriptions that allows the members to support the admins and mods. Owners can also link their PayPal to receive donations. Also adding paid post bumps and comment awards that users can purchase where the revenue is shared with the community owner.
There’s definitely possibilities there.
getting 500 million monthly users like Reddit is the hard part
If not at each forum I have to decide which variant of my name I pick and then remember. On reddit I could take that choice once for a huge number of forums. (as long as I was willing to share identity over different subreddits)
there's also kbin, and you can post/read from either with any Mastodon/Pleroma/Misskey account just with a worse UI. i'd be surprised at this point if the winner isn't just Activity Pub with some thin layer on top.
> different instances already stop federating each other, thus splitting the community early.
instances usually provide at least some reason when they defederate with each other. maybe users will learn to be cognizant of who they're associating with when they pick an instance. i've seen that with tech-literate friends joining Mastodon who pick a 4chan-like unfiltered/unhinged instance as their home without understanding that such an instance causes outsized complaints compared to the "average" instance and will have less access to outside communities as a result.
i'm sure there's an opportunity for better admin/mod tooling -- hopefully some of the defeds that have happened in Lemmy recently will reverse once things settle down -- but i think even with that it has to be a new way of thinking both for users and operators about what it means to be a member of an instance. it seems that when you hand someone a magic knob they can turn between "less toxicity/abuse" and "broader reach", most will turn it further toward that "less toxicity" edge than Twitter or Reddit do themselves -- even if the tooling for it's so crude. i get why that worries people, but honestly, the benefits of that in other federated systems i use so far have been incredibly worth it (and the cost of migrating to a different instance overblown).
as someone who stopped using Reddit a year ago, i get it. topical communities no longer exist in just one place. if you’re interested in 3d printing, say, you can join a reddit, join a chat group (in Discord, Telegram, Matrix — whatever app of choice), join a FB group or explore the topic on TikTok, find a 3d-printing themed Mastodon instance, …: and each one of these hosts adjacent communities. Reddit is no longer the only “community of communities” on the internet. if you zoom out, it’s been losing that moat for a while. users can get by decently well these days by choosing from 5+ apps they might already have installed when exploring a topical community. reddit killing their share of that app space doesn’t really help them.