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Comment by brushfoot | Hacker News Reader

I'm cautiously optimistic about Lemmy. Anyone can spin up an instance, so it's decentralized, but instances are connected, so there's community.

It may still be rough around the edges, but to me it feels like the spirit of the old phpBB forums combined with almost 20 years of lessons learned from Reddit.

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<rant> Not responding directly, just piggy-backing for lack of a better place to put this comment.

The problem with Lemmy is that one gets sent to some place like https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances, is immediately confronted with a ton of weird links like "butts.international" and "badblocks.rocks", what even is this? And about 100000 other servers just named "lemmy", "notlemmy", and "lemmy1". So you click a few at random optimistically, then get hit with login page, or a server error, or an apparently empty test-server. You begin to think you're being pranked, like am I supposed to brute-force click like 50 things to find something that's not a joke? Maybe you go to https://join-lemmy.org/ and it says "After you create an account, you can find communities", so great, it's inaccessible anonymously, the same as twitter. You go to https://lemmymap.feddit.de/ and after 15m of page-loading get a hilariously useless cyberpunk-looking word-soup where you can't click any links, much less search for topics/communities (btw there are 2068431 running instances and somehow butts.international is still front and center in my cyberpunk view)

Finally, by ignoring recommended tooling and just using google-search I found a community relevant to my interests, but it has pretty bad content and a whopping 1 user/day. Another google search trying to find a certain topic, I find one, but it has only 3 total comments, and I could not tell what month/year the posts were added.

So, clearly I don't really know what I'm doing here, but this stuff is ridiculous. As long as we're crawling 2068431 instances why don't we look at the communities it hosts and the volume/recency of traffic? At least filter totally empty stuff and/or make it easier to get all the test instances in a sandbox! Discoverability is so bad that I can barely get to the point where I'm considering usability / content.

You're making a very good point. I looked at lemmy stuff before but I moved to kbin instead. It has a more familiar interface (to reddit) and it is federated with lemmy. This all sounds good and it is. But even there I basically have no idea what's going on. It has more content than the lemmy instances you visited but every once in a while when I remember to visit I only look at whatever landing page I configured and can't figure out what's kbin, what's lemmy, what "magazine" I am looking at etc. To be fair, it's already a pretty good product and it is likely to get a lot better. That's exactly why I keep trying.

As someone who signed up for Lemmy and is planning to replace my Reddit use with it, I hear these points loud and clear. You also make a good point about Google search and how bad it’s become - I see so many stories of people adding “Reddit” to their search in order to get any decent results. This is the natural result when you have every business paying people for SEO and trying to game the system.

Between account walls and search’s indexing problem, it’s become very hard to find small to mid sized active communities on your own. In fact this problem seems to be something people are trying to solve in Reddit communities via related subreddits on the sidebar.

So having gone from using search engine’s to crawl for relevant content that was out there, people are now creating content specifically to end up in Google’s search results - destroying the value search once had. Indicated by what people have done on Reddit, and these discussions about finding alternatives, it seems we are well on our way back to webrings. I welcome this.

“it's inaccessible anonymously, the same as twitter”

This is not true. Communities can be browsed without login on their home instances.

Good example of irritating comment that led to the odyssey above. What you say also appears to not be true. The correct assertion is maybe: If you can find an instance, and if the instance is configured to allow anonymous, then you can browse communities. Since nothing is ranked or searchable, then if you're willing to do that for N instances and M communities, enduring server errors/login screens the whole way, maybe you can find decent content after weeks of brute-force labor. This isn't practical for someone who just wants to spend a few minutes finding a replacement for /r/math and /r/physics or whatever.

For the short term at least, since discoverability is so broken, I think those who want to advocate for Lemmy will be better served by just linking to content or curating indexes of active communities. It's not that useful to anyone if the focus is always about pretending everything is fine, or presenting prospective users with totally useless machine-generated indexes where we cannot tell the test-servers from production.

IIUC it's federated,not decentralized. Still pretty good but if a server drops offline it will be pretty inconvenient. The communities on that server will be dead.

Matrix does better as the rooms are decentalized so can continue even if the creating server drops offline. But user accounts are still only federated.

Lemmy.ml's admin is pro chinese government and actively censors comments that are critical. What that means to you is your decision, but I want to make people aware before the mass migration date arrives.

https://old.reddit.com/r/Save3rdPartyApps/comments/14k67qt/l...

Highly sus

Lemmy's team is very politicized, but even then it took significant pushback to change their minds about an issue that the community was decrying for reasons that were almost entirely technical.

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/622

I would not bed with these fellows myself.

It bothers me a little bit that having a strong stance against intolerance is seen as being “politicized.” That should just be normal and expected behavior.

Maybe they were abrasive in initially fighting the request to make technical changes to the slur filter, but hey when you ask for free enhancements to open source code you either do the work and provide a pull request or be prepared to be told no.

I empathize with their concern about becoming another Voat or Gab. They want federation but they don’t want a Wild West.

The problem is that the stance is incredibly shortsighted and in a way bigoted itself. Take a word filter that contains some regex for n**a. They are saying you should never use slurs and this word in particular in public discourse.

So the word above word is used in lyrics of a music genre with predominantly black musicians. In addition to saying we don't want our software to be used by racists, they also say "we don't want our Software to be used to discuss certain kinds of black music" (arguably a racist stance just by itself). Talk about unintended side effects.

yes, this is one of the trade offs of any system built where one must decide between human moderation/curation vs automating moderation/curation.

if automation is chosen there will absolutely be situations where perfection is impossible. if human’s unparalleled ability to see nuance is chosen then the cost scales along with the amount of information.

the fact is, if we want a community and we want to keep signal above noise, we will need some form of removal of spam, child porn, racism, etc…

automatic tools can’t nuance as well as humans.

then human mods start nuancing and someone will point at stuff and call it biased.

> It bothers me a little bit that having a strong stance against intolerance is seen as being “politicized.” That should just be normal and expected behavior.

It did not seem to me a politicized discussion but a technical issue with filtering using hardcoded blacklists that are just too prone to the Scunthorpe Problem. Perhaps because too many people in the USA despise the mere existence of other languages :)

I think we have to remember that this isn’t a commercial product, it’s a small project. They had a quick and dirty solution and weren’t willing to abandon it but also weren’t initially willing to put in the time to make a more robust solution.

Isn’t that just one instance? You don’t have to join that one.

It's the official instance, so it has a privileged position.

What privileges specifically? Are you forced to join it?

It is what people will probably view first when they find out about Lemmy, so it has the most attention.

This seems to be inaccurate. When I go to join-lemmy.org, and click join a server, the first servers on the list are at least semi-randomized recommended servers. Every time you refresh the page the selections change.

As far as the “popular” list, which is placed below the recommended list, lemmy.ml doesn’t have any special privileges there. It just happens to be the most popular. If something becomes more popular it will go on the top.

wow an explicitly marxist-leninist instance supports an explicitly marxist-leninist state? who would have thought

Can servers be ad supported? Like can I run a Google ad on my own instance?

There's nothing stopping you, the source code is freely available to edit when you start up your instance. It would probably limit the appeal of your instance to many people and maybe some very ideological smaller instances might defederate, I doubt the other major instances would care much since only those signed up at or browsing through your instance would see the ads.

I guess if I put enough effort into it I could fork it. Is it that easy though? Or not built in already

We know how much we all love ads. Let's have more of them!

I see absolutely no reason why an instance might not decide to fund itself on local ads. I see no reason why you couldn't choose an ad-supported or non-ad instance

Forums used to be ad supported, nothing particularly wrong with being ad supported. Problems occur when your investors expect 10x return on something ad supported.

But to have something pay for it self. I'd rather not lose money on it

Actually, there is something wrong with ad supported platforms. Advertisers start imposing restrictions on the actual content, or the owners of the platforms enforce restrictions pre-emptively so it never arises.

I was on a forum, and the kind of language and even topics for discussion were severely restricted, partly because of advertising.

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