Thus far they just keep jumping from one awful talking point to the next like a toddler trying to rationalize bad behaviour.

I’m not sure why people think of it this way. Why not just create a lemmy account and try it out? There’s no physical stuff to move (unlike moving to a new apartment or house). You’re not required to delete your Reddit account either.

Am I missing something here?

Lemmy’s having some growing pains right now (spinning wheel of death) but I’m confident they’ll be resolved. At that point, it’ll be much nicer to use, so I’m pretty happy with that.

As for people hoping to one day “jump over,” I think that’s a mistake with almost anything. Dip your toe in, don’t go “all in” on anything you’ve never used before. You’re much less likely to end up extremely disappointed that way.

The Tetris community created a Javascript gui called Fumen (https://harddrop.com/fumen/), that can be embedded into PhpBB forums.

The chess community created Javascript GUIs that read/write .pgn files (aka: move-history files) to help the community discuss games.

The Go community created a similar GUI for Go games. Etc. etc.

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Since the administrator controls the whole webpage (including Javascript), you can host local tools in a Reddit-like environment. I think people are sleeping on the potential here, especially if you've never used these custom web-GUIs before.

I did, twice. It took at least half an hour between bugs and scanning HN for answers to questions I was repeatedly told I shouldn’t be asking. (Like, how do I choose a server and what consequences does that decision bring. Questions which, after a defederation and onboarding bug and login bug, seemed quite pertinent.) Then there was minimal content, and to top it off, buttons that spin without doing anything half the time.

The admins at https://Lemmy.world continues to fix various bugs / performance issues.

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It looks like Beehaw.org curated the strongest community "before the #RedditBlackout". based on my browsing there, they're more focused on their various topics (anime, technology, programming), rather than the RedditBlackout... which is a much healthier long-term community feel. Alas, they have only kept that because they have made signups difficult.

Hopefully, Beehaw.org opens back up as the RedditBlackout wave subsides. They do plan to refederate in the long term, but only after new moderation-tools are created. No idea how long that would take, but no one seems to expect this particular defedization to stay forever.

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The communities that focus on... well... community... will win in the medium term. I recognize that most people are using Lemmy because they're angry at Reddit (and that's fine enough to create a short-term community). But people need to start thinking about what kind of community they want to create on Lemmy now, and not just be part of an angry protest.

Its happening, but slowly. Its harder to community-build than it is to just get angry and protest a webpage.

I see them being discussed. I don’t see them as “real issues” with lemmy though. They’re bugs to be fixed, not fundamental problems with the federation model.

Fediverse, and Lemmy in particular, has "good bones" on it. But the software desperately needs to fix a bunch of bugs. They weren't quite ready for #RedditBlackout, but who would be?

I'm thinking more from the perspective of kbin vs Lemmy. I don't think anyone's noted kbin bugs. kbin.social grew to over 35k+ users this past weekend, so they're also having a substantial boost from #RedditBlackout.

Community has somewhat arbitrarily chosen Lemmy as the first project to check out. Nothing wrong with that. I think I'll try kbin.social soon and see if my experiences are better. Especially since kbin.social is federating with Beehaw.org, Lemmy.world and other instances.

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But I feel like the choice of front-end is important. Little differences, like @community (kbin) vs !community (Lemmy) will make things incompatible in the long run. So a community needs to choose whether to be on kbin-side or lemmy-side of the fediverse.

The fundamental issue I found with Lemmy was the refusal to accept the onboarding process as being off putting to reasonable people I would want to interact with in an online community.

I feel like Beehaw.org is quite pragmatic. By cutting off the #RedditBlackout users, they've kept their community feel and the focus on community building. I dunno if I want to be part of Beehaw.org, but I support their decisions and can see the long-term benefits of their way of thinking.

Lemmy.world obviously is trying to capture #RedditBlackout traffic, and that's fine too. This has its downsides, the bulk of which is that 90%ish of the discussion on Lemmy.world is all around Reddit and/or Lemmy, as opposed to more pragmatic issues.

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The happy medium I've found is to look for specific communities, no matter where they are. https://programming.dev/c/programming is small but looks like it has the right mindset. https://mtgzone.com/c/mtg also looks to have the right mindset, by creating a Magic-the-gathering focused group.

The issue in the near term is human-coordination. People don't know which !communities or servers host the discussions they want yet. That's fine, people will self-organize one way or the other.

EDIT: Of course, https://Lemmy.world can work. But most users are obviously here for lower-effort experimentation rather than community building. The https://lemmy.world/c/android community seems to be taking off though and is on the right track.

I'm still holding on because... Lemmy sucks ;) Everyone is going there now, there are issues. Let's stick on Reddit, the feed is actually a bit better now that some less popular subreddits show up, with all others protesting in some way or another, and it's expected Lemmy will kneel under the big influx of users. There were such reports from the first or second day of "subreddits going dark," if I'm not wrong.

It will be there tomorrow, too.

If so - I made the offer to sell my accounts to any GDRP person for $1 such that I can make those requests for data (ill pay more than $1, its just to make it an actual transaction)

I have 17 years of content contributed to reddit... and I'd like to kill it all.

I understand wanting to send a message to Reddit leadership, but in reality the blip is so small as to probably not even register.

On the other hand, those comments will probably be valuable to someone, somewhere, sometime and all I'd be doing is harming those future readers and salting the metaphorical earth.

Looking further into the future, let's assume Reddit collapses in 5 years in 2027. The money is dried up, management is gone, and all that's left are decades of data hopefully archived. Are people 5, 10, 20 years from now going to appreciate that a subset of data was purged in protest? Or are they going to appreciate that they found some useful data still in the archive that might actually help something?

I'd rather be in the latter camp. And maybe one day someone will ask their at-home AI bot a question about <niche topic>, and a small part of me will be emitted in the output.

I'm not using reddit in the meantime to send a message of "this is what you're looking at when reddit keeps their current plans". I don't know if that's also part of your master plan, but if not, at least if a significant number of people think like that, then reddit has little reason to care.

I'm also on Tildes now, probably because of the invite-only FOMO, but a full comparative study (figuring out which lemmy instance to sign up with, as well as looking into other alternatives) is something I'll be forced to do only after June 30th, and I've mastered the art of procrastination so it's not going to be any sooner.

The question is whether it can become a default place to build an online community. Currently, the answer is no unless you have extremely strong ideological coherence that will get your users through the Kafkaesque onboarding process.

But Lemmy.world is... fine-ish? The main issue is the bugs. If the sending of the confirm email fails, the website spins forever without an error. (And it looks like so many "confirm emails' were sent, that Lemmy.world was getting blocked for spam by its provider).

If you have an underscore in your username, the signup process hangs and spins forever.

If your password is longer than 20 characters or so, the signup process hangs and spins forever.

Etc. etc. Its not the best process and these bugs need to be fixed. But if you're like me (who created at the right time with a typical password and typical username), you probably get in to https://lemmy.world just fine.

Beehaw fine. It was deliberate and up front about its gating, and they processed within a day or two, which again is fine because that’s what they said they’d need. (There are still random login bugs.) The process of getting one’s head around why a server must be selected, what trade offs that entails and how to make a decision about it is almost proudly dismissed by the Lemmy community, which is frustrating.

I agree.

Lemmy community seems to be "toxicly positive". They ignore the server choice because they are worried that informing users about servers will make them leave for other webpages.

It'd be more appropriate if they were just honest about the Fediverse. Fediverse puts server-administrators front-and-center. Choosing a server means trusting the local administrators: not just for your username, but with your posts (ie: delivering them), your communities you build on that server, and your words.

We know that on Reddit, the admins/moderators can modify your words, shadowban you and other such behaviors. And I expect these tools to be employed in Lemmy (not that I know how to use them yet, but there's nothing stopping a few PostgreSQL scripts from accomplishing effective shadowbans or other such behaviors).

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For now, I chalk it up to the various community members feeling the need to grow and being naive. Its something I'm keeping an eye on, I'm trying to find 'the adults' in the community and trying to evaluate them myself.

But the only way to do that is to join up and make test posts / test discussions.

Especially, I think, because there is a gulf between what the service intends to be and what people want it to be.

And most people would likely agree with you, however they'll have labelled a different 90% as the crap part. It's the bleed-over between those different parts that makes Reddit's huge user population effective at keeping up momentum even in smaller backwater subreddits. (e.g. "I'm already here reading r/funny, so I happen to see when occasional new stuff gets posted on r/obscurethingnobodycaresaboutbutme too")

https://the-federation.info/

The active user count isn't up that much. It's mostly people finding out about Lemmy or remembering it exists. They're building the communities that will be there when the Reddit API changes finally go into effect. It's actually better that it happen this way so most people's first impression coming from Reddit is a good one.

It not just the numbers. Those are likely opinionated reddit users that will help the platform go faster through its baby steps.