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Comment by jug | Hacker News Reader

Ugh, what an eventful time of social media this has been.

First Twitter API, then Reddit API, so today Apollo and many more Reddit clients shut down, and now Nitter. :-(

I'm happy Lemmy is kind of taking off. I think it's helped more than Mastodon because it's less realtime/feed focused and slower paced. It also doesn't require you to form a friend circle to benefit. Instead, the community is waiting for you already. You just sign up on an instance and add your communities. Done. This helped me a lot, together with sites like https://sub.rehab

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I really like lemmy too. I think the biggest issue is that people think of Lemmy itself as the replacement of reddit.com. But what makes more sense to me is thinking about Lemmy as a tool to build separate websites that are each a replacement for reddit.com and that these can interoperate with each other to grow based on the local users interests. I think the biggest hurdle is figuring out where to create your first account... it's just not intuitive and of course the more established sites shut down signups during mass waves as an anti-September protective measure.

I ended up starting at programming.dev because someone on HN mentioned it and it at least seemed to have a focus and also wasn't a ghost town. And that was pretty good but I've also joined beehaw (takes some time) because I like its size and decorum and generically would choose to get on their side of a defederation. And after I'm starting to understand how this whole activity pub and defederation and federation works, I really am optimistic about it.

I think somebody needs to build something that's a crossover between GitHub pages and activitypub that sort of behaves like discus and integrates with Lemmy/kbin/mastodon. So that blog writers can have comments at their own sites again and they can integrate together to grow organically. I haven't quite pieced it all together, but I sort of see that could grow as a replacement for what we lost with Google Reader and the loss of blog commenting communities.

> I think that's the biggest hurdle is figuring out where to create your first account.

Agreed. I think the barrier would be lower if I knew I could migrate my identity to another instance if the first one became sketchy or shut down or de-federated.

Instead AFAICT I have to choose not just what community to join and where the content will initially live, but also which of these random groups to trust with my identity indefinitely going forward.

Maybe we need some sort of self-identifying system.

Like SSH keys, where you manage your own identity and then share a public key to each instance that identifies you to that instance.

Like an identity client you could self manage if you wanted to. Make it optional, portable, and transferable. So you can choose to let a server host manage your identity, or migrate to a self managed identity.

If I had more time on my hands….

I've seen discussions that Mastodon has a way of migrating accounts. I don't know if that's a Mastodon specific thing or at the ActivityPub level. I don't think it migrates the content but I'm not sure. What I think it does is notify followers of the migration. I'm not sure anything like PKI is necessary.

Conceptually a planned migrations should have a period of concurrent access to both the old and new accounts and it should be easy to publish a handshake to confirm the migration to followers to update contact info. That's my thought anyway. Something like keybase (does that still exist?) could also be used for similar sorts of proofs.

The way people used to handle this on Reddit is people would send a message from their old account saying "hey XYZ is my new account" and that seems sufficient.

Yeah, good point about instances being communities! It’s like how the Star Trek one did it and my mind boggled when I realized you could (and someone has done so) make a national Lemmy _instance_ rather than just a /r/mycountry. And then everything there is localized! So you basically have a social news _site_ in your language that can federate with all the rest.

Of course, this goes for any major interest category but it just hit me the hardest so far to realize this.

Another cool development would be a science-oriented Lemmy instance with lots of special purpose sciency stuff.

Viewed like this, the sky is the limit for Lemmy and it could have potential to grow a lot!

> Another cool development would be a science-oriented Lemmy instance with lots of special purpose sciency stuff.

Something like this?

https://mander.xyz/communities

> An instance dedicated to nature and science. > The main focus of this instance is the natural sciences, and the scope encompasses all of the STEM fields.

What is Lemmy?

https://join-lemmy.org/

see also https://kbin.pub - kbin instances interoperates with Lemmy, but I somewhat prefer the interface.

One implementation of a Reddit style interface on top of ActivityPub.

It's one of the nice things about AP is that whatever interface you like best Twitter/Reddit/RSS can get you access to the same content.

I'm not sure about that entirely. It seems like kbin can federate with both mastodon and lemmy. Lemmy and kbin can federate with each other. But I don't think Lemmy and mastodon can right now. I don't know if that's deliberate or just unimplemented. I will say the kbin/mastodon interactions just seem... strange. Like you see mastodon users but I don't know why I wouldn't just use a mastodon client. But I haven't spent a lot of time directly inside kbin. I prefer the lemmy interface so far. People have described it as lemmy being like old.reddit and kbin being like new.reddit in feel.

Front Man for Motörhead. RIP.

Is Lemmy named after Lemmy?

Every keypress is a history navigation!!! What madness is this?

What we had before was a low interest rate phenomenon.

Indeed, I thought HN of all places would understand that the last 15 years were a bubble of zero interest rates. Now, companies have to be profitable or die.

I like tildes much more than lemmy, to be honest.

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