If HN had a subforum feature and an ability to embed pictures or videos in posts, or some kind of markdown light syntax, Reddit usage would die for me.
- It has no subforums
- Almost everyone here is in IT, other topics only get discussed when they are interesting to IT people. On reddit, you can talk to historians, mathematicians, language enthusiasts, fans of your favourite series, etc.
- HN usability on mobile is... yeah
- HN is text only, that's already difficult for programming, but would make talking about e.g. mathematics really annoying, and for people who want to share art, that's even more obviously not going to work
- also, I really wish you could block users
Of course, that often backfires.
HN hasn't actively sabotaged mobile. But it hasn't gone out of its way to make the experience better either.
I find HN a royal pain on mobile tbh. Everything clickable is so small.
Regarding mobile clients, there are at least a few third party mobile clients on both Android and iPhone that work quite well.
If not in the content-mix sense, then in the sense that there is one and only one homepage, and that it's everything posted to the site.
Though in truth: there are some alternate views. "Pool", "Invited", and "Best" are subsets of submissions. You can also do a blank search on Algolia and set a time window to view the best items of the past day, week, month, year, or other arbitrary interval.
dang does not want to have to look at CSAM.
Lemmy is still too obscure to be on the radar i guess.
Anyways, maybe this gives Lemmy a boost towards the next level.
If you want to join, probably better use one of the smaller instances.
Also without a business model they will struggle to maintain the servers required for even a tiny fraction of Reddit
Regarding the business model, there isn't any. At best it will be run by donations if the costs mount top high. I'm curious to see where it will go, but at least there are no ads at least not yet.
For now, but if this is how the maintainers of the main instance feel, how long before they start defederating from instances without their strict policies? Isn't that already happening on Mastodon?
The fediverse ends up really confusing because it gets so balkanized. "One domain, one community" is easy to understand. "We're all seeing the same stuff no matter where you are" is easy to understand. But with defederation as an option, you have to navigate a complicated web of the meta social network—the network of networks, and who federates with who.
Email doesn't have this problem so much because ideology is not a concern for private messaging. You have spam and you have anticompetitive behavior, but you don't have "random guy who happens to maintain the instance had a falling out with the random guy maintaining this other instance."
I don't mind if something is slighlty difficult to use, as it serves as a filter to participants and limits growth (subreddits with over 100,000 participants tend to be kind of guerrella marketing, meme-infested shitholes).
The obvious drawback of course is that you lose the non-tech savy interesting people and experts. I don't know how to mitigate that, but still very interested in seeing where this all goes.
This specific ideological slant is also not clear from its description on the instance list[0], especially when compared to instances like Lemmygrad.
I think we had the model right before the concept of social media came along, which is many small independent communities.