I've been planning a jump across, but have been waiting it out to see if they see the error of their ways.
Thus far they just keep jumping from one awful talking point to the next like a toddler trying to rationalize bad behaviour.
Thus far they just keep jumping from one awful talking point to the next like a toddler trying to rationalize bad behaviour.
I’m not sure why people think of it this way. Why not just create a lemmy account and try it out? There’s no physical stuff to move (unlike moving to a new apartment or house). You’re not required to delete your Reddit account either.
Am I missing something here?
Lemmy’s having some growing pains right now (spinning wheel of death) but I’m confident they’ll be resolved. At that point, it’ll be much nicer to use, so I’m pretty happy with that.
As for people hoping to one day “jump over,” I think that’s a mistake with almost anything. Dip your toe in, don’t go “all in” on anything you’ve never used before. You’re much less likely to end up extremely disappointed that way.
The Tetris community created a Javascript gui called Fumen (https://harddrop.com/fumen/), that can be embedded into PhpBB forums.
The chess community created Javascript GUIs that read/write .pgn files (aka: move-history files) to help the community discuss games.
The Go community created a similar GUI for Go games. Etc. etc.
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Since the administrator controls the whole webpage (including Javascript), you can host local tools in a Reddit-like environment. I think people are sleeping on the potential here, especially if you've never used these custom web-GUIs before.
I did, twice. It took at least half an hour between bugs and scanning HN for answers to questions I was repeatedly told I shouldn’t be asking. (Like, how do I choose a server and what consequences does that decision bring. Questions which, after a defederation and onboarding bug and login bug, seemed quite pertinent.) Then there was minimal content, and to top it off, buttons that spin without doing anything half the time.
The admins at https://Lemmy.world continues to fix various bugs / performance issues.
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It looks like Beehaw.org curated the strongest community "before the #RedditBlackout". based on my browsing there, they're more focused on their various topics (anime, technology, programming), rather than the RedditBlackout... which is a much healthier long-term community feel. Alas, they have only kept that because they have made signups difficult.
Hopefully, Beehaw.org opens back up as the RedditBlackout wave subsides. They do plan to refederate in the long term, but only after new moderation-tools are created. No idea how long that would take, but no one seems to expect this particular defedization to stay forever.
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The communities that focus on... well... community... will win in the medium term. I recognize that most people are using Lemmy because they're angry at Reddit (and that's fine enough to create a short-term community). But people need to start thinking about what kind of community they want to create on Lemmy now, and not just be part of an angry protest.
Its happening, but slowly. Its harder to community-build than it is to just get angry and protest a webpage.
I see them being discussed. I don’t see them as “real issues” with lemmy though. They’re bugs to be fixed, not fundamental problems with the federation model.
Fediverse, and Lemmy in particular, has "good bones" on it. But the software desperately needs to fix a bunch of bugs. They weren't quite ready for #RedditBlackout, but who would be?
I'm thinking more from the perspective of kbin vs Lemmy. I don't think anyone's noted kbin bugs. kbin.social grew to over 35k+ users this past weekend, so they're also having a substantial boost from #RedditBlackout.
Community has somewhat arbitrarily chosen Lemmy as the first project to check out. Nothing wrong with that. I think I'll try kbin.social soon and see if my experiences are better. Especially since kbin.social is federating with Beehaw.org, Lemmy.world and other instances.
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But I feel like the choice of front-end is important. Little differences, like @community (kbin) vs !community (Lemmy) will make things incompatible in the long run. So a community needs to choose whether to be on kbin-side or lemmy-side of the fediverse.
The fundamental issue I found with Lemmy was the refusal to accept the onboarding process as being off putting to reasonable people I would want to interact with in an online community.
I feel like Beehaw.org is quite pragmatic. By cutting off the #RedditBlackout users, they've kept their community feel and the focus on community building. I dunno if I want to be part of Beehaw.org, but I support their decisions and can see the long-term benefits of their way of thinking.
Lemmy.world obviously is trying to capture #RedditBlackout traffic, and that's fine too. This has its downsides, the bulk of which is that 90%ish of the discussion on Lemmy.world is all around Reddit and/or Lemmy, as opposed to more pragmatic issues.
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The happy medium I've found is to look for specific communities, no matter where they are. https://programming.dev/c/programming is small but looks like it has the right mindset. https://mtgzone.com/c/mtg also looks to have the right mindset, by creating a Magic-the-gathering focused group.
The issue in the near term is human-coordination. People don't know which !communities or servers host the discussions they want yet. That's fine, people will self-organize one way or the other.
EDIT: Of course, https://Lemmy.world can work. But most users are obviously here for lower-effort experimentation rather than community building. The https://lemmy.world/c/android community seems to be taking off though and is on the right track.
I'm still holding on because... Lemmy sucks ;) Everyone is going there now, there are issues. Let's stick on Reddit, the feed is actually a bit better now that some less popular subreddits show up, with all others protesting in some way or another, and it's expected Lemmy will kneel under the big influx of users. There were such reports from the first or second day of "subreddits going dark," if I'm not wrong.
It will be there tomorrow, too.
If so - I made the offer to sell my accounts to any GDRP person for $1 such that I can make those requests for data (ill pay more than $1, its just to make it an actual transaction)
I have 17 years of content contributed to reddit... and I'd like to kill it all.
I understand wanting to send a message to Reddit leadership, but in reality the blip is so small as to probably not even register.
On the other hand, those comments will probably be valuable to someone, somewhere, sometime and all I'd be doing is harming those future readers and salting the metaphorical earth.
Looking further into the future, let's assume Reddit collapses in 5 years in 2027. The money is dried up, management is gone, and all that's left are decades of data hopefully archived. Are people 5, 10, 20 years from now going to appreciate that a subset of data was purged in protest? Or are they going to appreciate that they found some useful data still in the archive that might actually help something?
I'd rather be in the latter camp. And maybe one day someone will ask their at-home AI bot a question about <niche topic>, and a small part of me will be emitted in the output.
I'm not using reddit in the meantime to send a message of "this is what you're looking at when reddit keeps their current plans". I don't know if that's also part of your master plan, but if not, at least if a significant number of people think like that, then reddit has little reason to care.
I'm also on Tildes now, probably because of the invite-only FOMO, but a full comparative study (figuring out which lemmy instance to sign up with, as well as looking into other alternatives) is something I'll be forced to do only after June 30th, and I've mastered the art of procrastination so it's not going to be any sooner.