Love this! This is the true spirit of FOSS software, and I hope more projects adopt this ethos.
Don't like how it works? Stop complaining and fork it. Don't like how it's being operated? Stop complaining and host your own instance!
1. Use the RSS client of your choice
2. Go to a master list of all federated Lemmy communities e.g. https://lemmy.world/communities/listing_type/All/page/1
3. Click through to any community on any instance that looks interesting and add its RSS feed to your client.
I don't know precisely what the future of Lemmy will be, I wish them well because they've produced a cool piece of software which is more open than Reddit and puts RSS front and center. But for the time being I simply have some Lemmy feeds right next to the old.reddit.com feeds in my RSS reader, pure win for me as a user. My universe grew and I don't have to have a horse in anyone's race. This is why we RSS.
Less than a sentence per instance, but it's enough to get a decent sense of what instances you're interested in exploring more.
Then again, I have hacker news in my RSS feed and get a link to both the article and comment thread. That's how I'm now able to reply to your comment. Not sure if Lemmy (or reddit) support this out of the box as well.
He doesn't, he's opposing users to contributors to the software in a response to the forking comment. Users do like/comment
> That's how I'm now able to reply to your comment.
No, you're able to reply using a separate app
The problem RSS solves is it prevents your whole world being captured by a particular community, instance, server, platform, company, whatever. Half the Internet is having an existential crisis over the Reddit implosion. RSS users aren't - we're kind of shrugging our shoulders and saying, well that's one of 10 places we get community, info, whatever, sure it's a big one but if it vanished overnight (which it sort of did) 85% of my feed would still be there.
Reddit, Lemmies, blogs, podcasts, Mastodon instances, weird alt Tube sites, the Chans, the Tildes, SDF, probably more - contrary to recent HN posts about how all the web feels "samey" now, it's a big 'net out there these days. It's merely a question of the company you keep. If you only ate at chain restaurants, you'd feel that food has gotten pretty lame too.
Until it does it's not an alternative to SOCIAL networks
> If you decide you care enough about a given community
What if I don't have time to evaluate the whole community and just decide that I care enough about a given piece of content and want to add my very valuable contribution by upvoting?
> whole world being captured by a particular community, instance, server...
This is a nonexisting problem since there are many of those, so
> one of 10 places we get community, info ... 85% of my feed would still be there
this comparison doesn't make sense, if you only used Reddit for 15% of you news/ consumption, didn't care about it (didn't have any social capital there etc.) or other users, you'd also not have any existential crisis regardless of whether you used RSS or something else to read Reddit/other sources
I get what you’re saying butI think this doesn’t matter quite as much as it does with Twitter, Facebook, etc.
Plenty of us preferred when Reddit was less like a modern social media network (mostly the pitfalls) and are more than happy just lurking. I don’t need an online status light. I don’t want some weird “snoovatar” NFT nonsense. I want /r/videography so I can continue to learn about my craft. An RSS feed sounds great and I’m kind of annoyed at myself for no thinking of it already lol.
I like tools that do one thing well. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy
It's well documented that 95% of users are lurkers. 95% of the time I'm lurking, too. That's why following multiple communities across multiple platforms is useful. For the frequent times when we all lurk.
> It's well documented that 95% of users are lurkers
then you wouldn't mind citing a source? Though bear in mind that in this context lurker is a social media platform user who: a) reads but b) never interacts (no likes, no shares, no comments, no posts, no messages, no games etc.)
You say this when I’m talking to you through my RSS reader’s built-in browser. That seems pretty social to me.
I’ve done the same with Reddit, and if Lemmy is truly as RSS-filled as this thread has led me to understand then the same is possible via Lemmy.
Just because you don’t understand something doesn’t mean it “fails”.
I also suggest using Invidious for getting YT RSS feeds, its incredibly simple and a much cleaner (and more private) experience all around.
There's money to be made in constantly ringing the outrage bell.
Remember Jordan Peterson talking about building a censorship-free Patreon[0]? That was 5 years ago. Never went through with it obviously, because Patreon is just one of many things that carnival barkers "content creators" can make hay with. Tomorrow, it'll probably be a Disney movie.
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/jordan-peterson-says-hell-la...