I run a few groups, like @[email protected], mostly on Friendica. It’s okay, but Friendica resembles Facebook Groups more than Reddit. I also like the moderation options that Lemmy has.
Currently, I’m testing jerboa, which is an Android client for Lemmy. It’s in alpha, has a few hiccups, but it’s coming along nicely.
Personally, I hope the #RedditMigration spurs adoption of more Fediverse server software. And I hope Mastodon users continue to interact with Lemmy and Kbin.
All that said, as a mod of a Reddit community (r/Sizz) I somewhat regret giving Reddit all that content. They have nerve charging so much for API access!
Hopefully, we can build a better version of social media that focuses on protocols, not platforms.
For wide spread adoption there are a lot of issues with the fediverse. The main one is the home pages of fediverse instances or join-X.org sites immediately turn people away with their language, jargon and content. Nobody cares about the open source licence, or how it’s “federated” or what the developers can do, or that you can run your own server or what languages and frameworks it’s built on etc. These all will turn people away. Literally the first sentence on join-lemmy is “Lemmy is a selfhosted social link aggregation and discussion platform”. Nobody wants to self host anything (well I do, but near to 100% of people don’t). Then there are screen shots of code diff’s and actual code, then a list of programming languages, then some Latin with hard to see ‘mod tools’, and then at the end back to self hosting “With Lemmy, you can easily host your own server, and all these servers are federated”. None of this is enticing people in. It’s turning people away.
These entrances to the fediverse should be about community, discussions, engagement etc. That’s what people want to sign up for and start participating. Just get them signed up. Once they’re in they can learn about the other benefits and that they can move the profile to different servers, or whathaveyou. Keep all the other bumf hidden away behind a “benefits” link.
Someone needs to come up with better terminology to fediverse and federated to avoid having to explain it all the time. It’s federated… You know… Like email. Well I’ve used email a long time and nobody has ever called it federated or used that term before when talking about any aspect of email - and I run my own email server.
Tl:dr: just cut the crap and make on-boarding easier. Dont let developers dictate the content of the homepage.
“Lemmy is a selfhosted social link aggregation and discussion platform”
Okay seriously, this was my first issue. Someone on Reddit recommended Lemmy to me and I saw that and immediately went back to them and was like “WTF?”.
Lemmy: Front pages of the internet
I do agree that for the average user, its not as easy as “lol funny cat gifs and memes are here, just make an account”
Reddit was much more easy for user adoption
In theory, I agree with you! A 100%, but the problem is that currently Lemmy doesn’t support migrating your profile to a different server. So that already slightly complicates things. So from the get-go they are forced to make choice. A choice which isn’t clear, what potential consequences are and the fact they currently easily migrate to a different server, obviously doesn’t help.
“Like email” is basically the same description I’ve been using to explain it to non-tech people.
Long story short, onboarding needs to get better. But that also applies for other Fediverse projects (like Mastodon or Friendica).
I’m not sure the ‘like email’ thing helps.
Email is confusing and not what most people use to connect with others. I don’t know anyone who met via email.
Trying to get groups of people to connect meaningfully over email didn’t work. Messenger apps did work as they removed user freedom to top-reply and break everything.
I’m vaguely interested in IT, seflhost a little and compile a kernel from time to time but email still seems esoteric and confusing to me.
Join the fediverse! It’s as simple as setting up an email server!
I’m not sure the ‘like email’ thing helps. Email is confusing and not what most people use to connect with others. I don’t know anyone who met via email.
In my experience it at least helps in the sense that, when people ask “why are there more then 1 site?” ? And up to a certain degree you use that to explain the concept of federating.
I don’t know anyone who met via email.
Nearly every business contact I have I met via email.
I agree for the most part and that the front page should be more focused on what the user will gain or be able to do if they join and in language that understand. However, the first sentence is “Follow communities anywhere in the world” not bad at least. It should elaborate on what that means.
Some people of course really do care about FOSS and letting people know that or even just having them see those words/ideas is important IMHO. It could, however, elaborate by saying “social media that is not corporate controlled” or whatever that may make the point about it more clear.
Dont let developers dictate the content of the homepage.
I get the sentiment, but who is going to do it? just as the developers are donating their time, there will need to be community minded folks doing the same.
Lemmy doesn’t have a marketing budget to spend on a community manager.
There are a couple issues open on join-lemmy’s github - https://github.com/LemmyNet/joinlemmy-site/issues, but not a lot in the way of contributing to fix it.
I mean, I get for a lot of people it’s not user friendly, but ultimately Lemmy is not some start up that has to grab a market share quick. If no one contributes better documentation, perhaps there won’t be a high enough adoption rate, but that’s ok for Lemmy.
Finding a good analogy is hard. But at the risk of sounding like a snob, a little barrier to entry isn’t always a bad thing…
The thought of trying to explain this to one of our users (helpdesk monke). No thanks…
A barrier to entry might be a life and death issue for Lemmy.
Lemmy was not created last week, man. All you see here today already existed and was running when spez hit the fan. In that sense, part of what attracts me to this is a bit of the barrier to entry. I find it enticing, it reminds me of the good old days, where you had to earn your way in, in a sense. Of course that’s silly old man talk, because honestly, all you have to do is select any random site and sign up. Lemmy.world, Lemmy.ml, it all comes down to the same thing. This “barrier” to entry is almost fictitious, and I feel that’s the ideal type of barrier.
Similar to how the internet culture was before it was popular, only vested people were online
Dead links don’t help… join-X.org
I’m working on this, but getting onboard is very tough!
If I can work this out (being rather dumb) I can see a bright future being able to help and explain it to noobs…
Problem is, how will that work, if the noobs can’t join a thread and get started?
I hate when threads and comments automatically update, scrolling content down my browser.
I hate that when I hit back on my web browser, it doesn’t bring me back to where I was previously on the page. I have to scroll down all over again.
Lack of content or small communities don’t bother me. It just means more people need to contribute, myself included.
This has been driving me nuts. I’ll be reading and come back to it a few mins later and it’s at the top again.
Used Reddit for 13 years, tried out Kbin and Lemmy yesterday and settled on Lemmy.
Long story short, I’m going back to Reddit.
- There needs to be ONE site, Lemmy.com, that people goto. This entire thing about having .whateveryouwant is VERY off putting. Most internet users have been trained to be extremely wary of odd or unusual things, so having anything besides .com/.net/.org will turn away a huge portion of users.
I initially setup an account on Lemmy.world, then realized that I couldn’t migrate it to another server and that when I deleted that account on that server all my comments were deleted.
Deciphering the distributed nature of it took me, a relatively tech-friendly person, almost the entire day and several ‘What the fuck?’ posts. I now understand it more. There are some very low-level guides that have been haphazardly put together, but there absolutely needs to be a MUCH smoother guide/explanation to this whole thing. That learning process will turn people away for sure.
- BECAUSE I understand it more now, I’m left feeling VERY uncomfortable about my data security. If this is going to become a mainstream thing, as it reaches and before it gets to that critical mass of users, there’s going to be SO. MANY. SECURITY ISSUES. There’s no 2fa at all, hacking and user-account hacking is just going to run rampant, and I’m left wondering ‘Where is my username and password actually stored?’. The answer, sadly, is wherever the dude who’s running the instance/server is. In the ‘Fediverse’ your server instance might be hosted in a US or EU data center with proper digital and physical security, or it could be Joe Blows basement in Iowa running off a NAS. The easy-to-see future here is that Lemmy will fail to attract a critical mass of people because they’ll initially arrive, after a few months their instances will just cease to exist/get shut down/the hosts will decide its no longer a fun hobby to do.
With a large corporation, they have the staff and resources to secure and maintain the servers physically and digitally, and keep staff up-to-date on current infosec threats and get out in front of them. Beyond that, if there IS a breach, they have the ability to recognize it, understand the legalities and requirements of reporting it, and can be held accountable by regulatory bodies. Joe doesn’t have the resources to really maintain and keep a server running, nor the knowledge of his responsibilities for keeping the data safe digitally or physically.
On top of that, if Joe’s basement loses power/gets hacked/Joe decides he’s moving to San Fransisco and can’t bring his NAS with him and the server goes down, and that’s where my instance is hosted well there goes my entire account/comments/data.
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Finding and subbing to communities is painfully difficult. It should be one-click, but somewhere I need to goto an external list, find what I want, and then copy/paste the URL into the search… and then 50% of the time, it doesn’t work. This is an understandable growing pain and can likely be fixed by UI/UX upgrades, but for now it’s a definite turn-off.
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There simply is no content. I’m not a creator, I want content aggregated for me, and I’ve gotten used to having a single place to get it from that floods me with thousands of different articles/memes/posts/etc every minute. Until the user base arrives in one single place and starts generating content, there’s no reason for most people like me to be there as by far the larger number of users never create anything at all and only exist to consume the content generated.
Sorry, but a lot of your concerns you outline, I just don’t agree with.
There needs to be ONE site, Lemmy.com, that people goto.
No… Reddit’s singular biggest issue is the fact that everyone is beholden to Reddit’s whim. Leaving any of this to any singular company/persons whims is a big problem. Moderator banned you from a subreddit cause they powertrip? What’s your recourse? You have none.
This entire thing about having .whateveryouwant is VERY off putting.
And yet emails are not a problem. Why specifically is this off putting? You’ve never emailed anyone outside of gmail.com? or outlook.com?
Most internet users have been trained to be extremely wary of odd or unusual things, so having anything besides .com/.net/.org will turn away a huge portion of users.
Statistically this is very wrong. Quite the opposite in fact. Users are terrible at identifying ANYTHING malicious as actually being “Wrong”.
I initially setup an account on Lemmy.world, then realized that I couldn’t migrate it to another server and that when I deleted that account on that server all my comments were deleted.
Just like setting up an email on Gmail doesn’t mean you can just migrate to Outlook… and yes I would hope that deleting your account would delete all your comments. That’s a GOOD thing.
BECAUSE I understand it more now, I’m left feeling VERY uncomfortable about my data security.
What security are you talking about? There’s nothing “secure” here. You’re posting things to a public forum for all intents and purposes. What security are you expecting?
There’s no 2fa at all
Slated for release with v0.18 which will probably drop within the next few weeks or so… But if your only concern for account security is 2fa… then you probably don’t realize that long unique passwords are perfectly fine. I only really see this being an issue if you’re a moderator or admin of an instance though. As both of those things… I actually don’t currently see a problem. 2fa will be a welcomed addition though.
hacking and user-account hacking is just going to run rampant
Just like on every other service on the internet? It seems that most places do fine without this worry.
and I’m left wondering ‘Where is my username and password actually stored?’
On the instance you signed up for your account on. In your case that would appear to be lemmy.ca. That’s the only instance that even really knows who you are. The rest of the instances just believe the origin instance of the data.
The answer, sadly, is wherever the dude who’s running the instance/server is.
Yup. But that’s the case with ANY online service. Where’s your facebook data? How about the massive amounts of data that google collect on you? Where’s every bit of that? The hope and prayer is that it’s safe in some datacenter that has armed guards and all that. The reality is that data leaks happen. Engineers go home with harddrives full of backups that have all your data on it. Hell your doctors office probably has this issue… https://www.classaction.org/pediatric-data-breach-connexin. I don’t see you complaining about that. This service is not super sensitive… and if you believe it is… host your own instance.
With a large corporation, they have the staff and resources to secure and maintain the servers physically and digitally, and keep staff up-to-date on current infosec threats and get out in front of them.
And yet everyday you hear about some other company that got completely shafted… and more user information leaked out there like it belongs in the wild. But I once again have to ask… Aside from password (which is hopefully long and unique)… What content do you have on lemmy that actually matters? You realize that everything you post on a platform like this or Reddit is public… There’s nothing you should ever assume to be “secure” or private on a platform like this, including Reddit. You bring this up so many times… What are you uploading that’s sensitive that you think needs to be secure?
Finding and subbing to communities is painfully difficult. It should be one-click, but somewhere I need to goto an external list, find what I want, and then copy/paste the URL into the search… and then 50% of the time, it doesn’t work. This is an understandable growing pain and can likely be fixed by UI/UX upgrades, but for now it’s a definite turn-off.
Finally a legit concern. Yes, finding communities is actually a bit annoying. There’s work being done to fix it. Remember this is version 0.17.4 that we’re on right now. And the mass influx of people trying the platform out is putting a ton of stress on lots of undersized server instances. Things will happen… But same story with reddit… Reddit just had 3-4 hours of downtime because some subreddits went private. They’re not perfect either… what’s their excuse? It can’t be because it’s new and small…
There simply is no content. I’m not a creator, I want content aggregated for me
What? There’s TONS of content already. You need to join more communities I think. Reddit was never there to generate content either though. It’s an aggregator, not typically a source.
I didn’t have the energy to write all that and what I woud have written would have been 90% the same so thank you! The parent doesn’t know how things actually are in corporations. Neither about hosting stability, nor data security, nor regulation, nor financial security, nor responsibility. Most of the concerns they had with the random dude are valid for any typical, in other words limited liability, corporation. And the big instances are not at all hosted by some random dude. You can’t run a big instance without sysadmin knowledge at the very least. The three I have looked into, lemmy.ca, lemmy.world and lemmy.ml, are all run by either software developers or system/database admins. At least two of them are also well funded which we can tell due to the transparent funding and available track record. Small non-profit teams and organizations have made much bigger contributions to my life and society than many big corporations. From Wikipedia, through Mozilla to all the outfits behind most open source software that literally runs the world. Two random dudes write the crypto for the security that nearly every corporation uses (OpenSSL). Anyways. I’m not writing this to change minds. Just expressing my thoughts and reaction. 🥲
I tried not to bring up individual instances… but to your point there… I’m a CISO… My whole job is data security. My instance is 100% for sure safe… and honestly I probably have better tools in place than a good 80-90% of companies that you give all sorts of private information to.
I felt that point wasn’t specifically relevant, but it’s just odd that people treat companies as better than individuals in general… My uptime actually beats Amazon this year so far. And I’m hosting from hardware in my garage, which happens to be a cluster of proxmox boxes with a good dedicated 60 amps of power and 6+ hours of battery backup.
The datacenter my business is in contract with… I have better uptime than them… They’ve had 3 major outages in the past 9 months.
Businesses are not infallible… and honestly are likely worse to work with since no individual ever feels compelled to own up to the mistakes. It’s always shareholders and money with businesses. I love working with vendors that are 1-3 man teams… They are ALWAYS vested and always do good work IMO… It’s the large places that pass the buck everywhere they can and everything is always a shoe-string shitshow.
Just my additional 2 cents to continue the discussion.
Heavy agreement. Having seen how corporations host and treat data, it’s a clown show. Everyone knows noone can be held accountable beyond being fired and execs and shareholders know they can’t lose the money they already made. It’s certainly better than that in some places but that’s the baseline because those are the incentives. It’s only better if there’s lots of money on the line in case of a data breach.
So should we update from Ubuntu 18.04 since it’s running out of support? Weeeell… we should but let’s write this feature first. It won’t be too bad if we run for a few months without security patches.
That’s of course security patches by some random dudes, for the software written by the random dudes.
🤦♂️🤦♀️🤦
Anyway, what’s your instance?
https://lemmy.saik0.com is my instance. I’m treating it as the original myspace idea… friends of friends can get in. Also makes the local communities much better IMO…
Running in an LXC container on a proxmox cluster, all the data stored on a ceph cluster. Backed up nightly to a large 400TB backup server. Proxied through cloudflare (yes I’ve gotten cloudflare working correctly enough… I should probably clean up the page rules a touch…). The only thing I’m missing in my “homelab” is offsite backup… Of which I’m looking for tape libraries or similar things I can put into my rack to swap out every week or so to an offsite location.
And your example of the Ubuntu thing is even worse the moment you bring up windows environments. I know so many companies still running Windows 2012… And their reasoning? “Well it’s still supported until October right?”… Not realizing it probably takes months to a year to validate all the software they’re going to have to migrate. Clown show is accurate.
Great stuff.
Honestly, even if most folks from Reddit don’t stay, the ones that know will most likely stay. I’ve been here for a week and I know I will. In the worst case scenario it’ll turn out like Slashdot used to be. Frequented by knowledgable folks sharing News for nerds, stuff that matters. If that’s all we get in the end, it won’t be so bad. 👌
But I think a lot more will stay.
Anyway, good night!
Yes thank you for explaining it so well. The OP is just spouting ignorance
What you’re describing is just another Reddit. Where, eventually, a few select individuals with all the power make the wrong decisions and this entire disaster happens all over again.
Lemmy (and the fediverse) is a chance to change all that. It brings power back to the people, to the community.
I think that’s the exact opposite of what this is. ALL the power on Lemmy is limited to 1 person: The instance host. They set the rules, they decide they don’t like you or the server, your entire account gets deleted because they shut it down. Another instance gets into a flame war or conflict with another, they block THE ENTIRE OTHER SERVER, essentially quarentining them out of existing.
BECAUSE I understand it more now, I’m left feeling VERY uncomfortable about my data security. If this is going to become a mainstream thing, as it reaches and before it gets to that critical mass of users, there’s going to be SO. MANY. SECURITY ISSUES. There’s no 2fa at all, hacking and user-account hacking is just going to run rampant, and I’m left wondering ‘Where is my username and password actually stored?’. The answer, sadly, is wherever the dude who’s running the instance/server is.
I wonder if IPFS would be better suited for the fediverse for this reason? You’ve brought up some solid points here and if history is anything to go by, it’s likely already seeing some exploitation in the wild. I think there’s likely to be a lot of work needed here. For example: Your cookies store JWTs in base85. Nice!
lmao ok bud, glhf
It’s funny; I know the usual advice is to stick to com/net/org, but I think there’s a certain crowd online that’s all about the wacky TLDs. I’ve definitely seen devs and artists with TLDs like .pizza and .rocks (not a portfolio, but https://stoneclub.rocks as example). I’ve seen enough of these sites that something like https://sh.itjust.works doesn’t make me blink and I trust I’d be able to tell a phishing site from folks playing with TLDs, but I can totally understand how that could be off-putting without that sort of background.
If I see a URL like this, I, and… polling my coworkers here… All 52 coworkers on my group chat would say these are highly suspicious and would not click on them. I imagine this is the general consensus for internet-savvy people.
- I’m happily reading a post on Reddit, and see a link like that: clearly dangerous.
- I’m happily reading a post on Lemmy, and see a link like that: probably dangerous, but possibly a Lemmy instance? Impossible to tell. I want to read Lemmy, not whatever “stoneclub” is.
It would be great if links to remote Lemmy instances had some kind of styling applied; a little icon, etc., that would make it clear this link is within the fediverse.
Good points.
I’ll be going back to Reddit too but I suspect everything will not be as it once was and much of it will be finding out where others have fled to.
There was ~1-5000 people on here over the last year or so which isn’t huge in terms of subreddits, it seems to have jumped to 100,000+ in the past week or two. Teh current content seems reasonable for an ~100k subreddit.
It’s hardly been 24 hours, but this is the most engaged I’ve felt in an online space in years. I’ve gone on a k.bin/Lemmy/Mastodon tear over the past day, exploring instances and looking for the one that I vibe with the most. So far I’ve been very happy with Beehaw as my home base, and love that I still have access to the communities on the other instances as well. It takes a slight bit of effort to find communities and make sure that I’m subscribed to them on this account, but I’ve actually found some satisfaction in the process.
Sure, there’s a low volume of content compared to the old place, but if I wanted a constant barrage of content I could just go back to RSS readers and have my fill. It’s the discussion and sense of connection that has made it worth investing my time here.
Hard agree, definitely feels more personable. People are making an effort to understand one another and people are collectively calling out the shitty things. Very nice change of pace
I am enjoying actual discussions and not just hot takes or rants. I don’t care if the platform is “perfect”. It’s good enough for me. The admins aren’t some corporation just looking for pavlovian click labor (‘likes’ and upvotes) to power their algorithm run ad fest.
As others have said, I need it to not act like a Twitter feed and constantly update, pushing stories down the page as new ones come in even while I’m trying to read the existing ones. I suspect that fixing this will also make returning to the page from a followed link not send me back to the top, because that is really annoying. Navigation is also a bit clunky at the moment, and it’s still hard to switch to a new community without going all the way back to the main page. I feel like the negatives are outweighed by the positives however, and I’m really starting to like this place…
I was one of the original refugees from digg.com. This feels like R*ddit of old - simple layout, techie userbase, friendly community. Feels like home.
I’m loving it. It’s like the good old days of smaller forums, except they all link together to become a reddit-like conglomerate, best of both worlds.
I do miss having a high-quality iOS app most, but mlem is certainly off to a good start.
I like it and was able to adapt easily, but some of the UI is terrible (and I mean this in a constructive way), specifically:
- Page weight is too high, when I use back/forward or switch tabs on mobile my browser has to do a full refresh. Tildes and kbin are very lightweight by comparison, not sure what the JS code of Lemmy/Beehaw are doing to cause this issue.
- Adding new subs is confusing, but mostly because the “Subscribe” button is hidden by default when you visit a community on another instance.
- The process of subscribing is convoluted You 1. visit an instance, 2. find a community, 3. copy the url,4. go back to your community, 5. past it, 6. open the search link in your instance, then 7. click subscribe and wait a little. It feels like that can be streamlined or something.
- Loading “All” is slow, I understand why, but the UI should do something to explain it to me instead of popping in posts.
But, the discussion seems good, the actual UI is reminiscent of old reddit so I’m happy, and I’m surprised how easy it is to discuss things across instances.
It’s looking great! I joined just 2 days ago and the communities I subscribed to are already looking much more lively today. Thanks, Reddit blackout!
Also written in Rust, btw :)
it is really annoying to subscribe to communities on federated servers – there should be a link that will redirect you to your home server. As of now I seem to have to copy and paste the community address into the URL because the feddit.de community search doesn’t seem to be working for me
Enjoying it, but wondering if I’m missing a way to work backwards to find communities.
I’ll give an example - Sleep Token, a band I like, released an album not too long ago. If I Google “reddit sleep token”, I can see a few communities like /r/metalcore and /r/progmetal discussing them, so I can guess I might want to join those communities.
If I Google for “lemmy sleep token”, I get a bunch of random websites with articles about sleep token with links and quotes about motorhead.
Whats the strategy for working backwards like that on Lemmy? Is there one?
Still getting the hang of things. There’s definitely a learning curve compared to reddit. Been using reddit for 10+ years and there has been a noticeable decline in the last few years. Things are quite fragmented at the moment and unfortunately the majority of my communities are still only active on reddit.
Its pretty much the same as old reddit, so it is fine. I am sure that there will be addons and stuff to bring back any functionality that is missing.
In terms of the community, it is hard to say - the same subs that I spent so much time and enjoyed so much are either not here or nowhere near as big and developed. I used to spend a lot of time on Formula1, Battlebots, but my account was nearly 12 years old and I had many that I used to visit from time to time for fun. Many of those are just not there in any meaningful way.
It is just going to take time to rebuild, I think.
I love the concept of decentralization. Feels more like the internet of old.
