Transitioning /r/Rust to the Threadiverse | Hacker News Reader

Rust to the Threadiverse

blog.erlend.sh

54 pointscodetrotter14 comments

> 1: Platforms die with a whimper, not a bang. Digg, the precursor to Reddit, is still around today, it's just not relevant. You can even visit MySpace right now if you'd like, but you won't. Twitter/X may still be operational, but its status as the internet's public square has long since been lost (not that it ever deserved it).

> 2: Twitter and Reddit may have only lost a few million users to Mastodon and Lemmy so far, but these are nation-sized numbers, comparable to what Scandinavia is to the United States of America. The incumbents have allowed the fediverse to reach critical mass. It's only gonna get bigger, but it already works well enough that I've no need for any other social network. It's nicer here.

Another critical point is that users who jumped ship are probably disproportionately power users and content creators, which make up a tiny fraction of Reddit's population.

But on the contrary, less technical communities are having much more difficulty migrating than, say, /r/Rust, and seem to be migrating to Discord instead.

> Another critical point is that users who jumped ship are probably disproportionately power users and content creators

That’s definitely been my experience with Twitter. It’s weird because the overall number of users and therefore general level of chatter doesn’t feel any different. It’s just… worse. Algorithmically prioritising people that have a paid subscription has definitely made it even worse than it would have already been.

> Digg, the precursor to Reddit, is still around today

Not really true. The only thing Digg today has in common with its namesake is the domain name. Different owner, different model, different content, different people. Today it's a (pretty decent) curated list of content with no voting, comments or even categories.

Why is this conversation about reddit-alternatives now about the fediverse/lemmy/mastodon etc? Reddit is a forum host. Get a new forum for r/rust. (If that's a lemmy install, so be it) Done. Fediverse doesn't even have to be in the conversation.

This blog post is from the perspective of someone who uses the Fediverse that wants to provide a space similar to /r/rust, not the folks who run /r/rust saying they're moving it over to the Fediverse.

(The author said on reddit that they semi-regret the title once it escaped the original audience, they didn't realize what it sounded like.)

Indeed, they already have https://users.rust-lang.org. But there's a desire for a Reddit-like news sharing site for the community.

The most important articles will get cross-posted everywhere organically and people looking for "discovery" (self-promotion) will learn to cross-post as well.

But I'm skeptical about replies getting cross-posted between communities, which seems like a great way to keep silly arguments going when it would be better if they died out? It reminds me of accidental reply-all on email lists.

So it seems like automatic cross-posting only links and questions might be enough?

it’s not fair to compare early web platform death to todays web. the user bases are much higher. the content between them is more consistent and less exclusive.

maybe back 15 years ago you could have a single social platform dominate but today that’s far less likely. now there’s a bunch of platforms that all more or less share the same content and creators cross post to as many as possible

reddits death is greatly exaggerated

Yes. I think they’re not dying. They’re turning into zombies, soulless husks that eat the brains of anyone who gets too close.

As someone who uses reddit semi regularly, it seems Reddit Inc won the battle, most of the subredits I frequent have gone back to normal. In the end it would seem their compromise on allowing APIs for moderation tools/bots while not allowing it for regular clients was enough for most people.

wow https://fedidb.org/ is great!

Please don't move programming related foruns to the fediverse. For the life of me, I can't find a good search engine that indexes the fediverse the same way reddit it currently indexed.

Can someone TLDR this? Specifically: what is the new url for r/rust?

The TLDR is that there isn't ONE new URL -- several locations for discussion have appeared, and this is still an issue. The article gives three examples specifically:

- https://lemmyrs.org/

- https://lemmy.ml/c/rust

- https://programming.dev/c/rust

Essentially Lemmy instances share content between all instances that have agreed to federate with each other, so it shouldn't matter which you pick as long as they are linked with each other, but the way things are linked right now just isn't good enough. The author thinks the FEP-d36d proposal [1] will help group related content together better and is requesting someone who knows Rust to step up and try implementing it. If I understood correctly, they would like you to discuss it at [2] if you are interested in helping.

[1] https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/src/branch/main/fep/d36d/...

[2] https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/fep-d36d-sharing-conte...

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