As far as which instance to join, well, that’s kinda like email, too. Look at the instances that are out there (the email providers in this example, like Gmail vs Mailfence), see if you like their policies and moderation and community “vibe,” and join the one that suits you.
https://beehaw.org is a big one that I like very much. Not really any memes there, the user base tends more toward the mature and considerate, and overall the level of interaction feels much better than Reddit ever did, post Digg exodus.
Ok, that does not sound reassuring. What does that mean for my account if the server I am on disappears? Can I still login? Will my posts disappear? (probably not, but join-lemmy.org doesn‘t say if I am not mistaken)
My email provider has some way to make money. There is a good chance that it is around in 10 years. What about these servers? Who is running them and why should a single one still be around in 10 years?
If the choice of a server really is not important, why doesn’t join-lemmy.org have a "join random server" button.
Maybe these are non-issues. As a casually interested person I genuinely don’t know.
IME the reason they don't have a "join random" button is that would be bad for smaller instances and a "join largest and most popular instance" would be criticized for showing favoritism and discourage adopting the entire point of decentralized technology. Matrix gets this criticism all the time because they push a default sever in their defacto standard app Element.
As a casually interested user? Just Google what to do because more users will trust the latest tweet or reddit thread more than a FAQ page. You most likely created an email account without going to "email.acme.org" and asking what provider to pick and probably have gone though a few providers without much loss.
https://infosec.pub/pictrs/image/c34aab77-9c37-4264-b821-750...
And a beginners guide
There are literally thousands of sites that let you login with your google account.
Why would I deliberately tie multiple logins to one credential, which may or may not go out of my control for any or no reason whatsoever? I'm not even talking about Google specifically here, I'm talking in general terms.
The more I hear about the federated multiverse, the more I see it as just another centralization abstraction layer on the decentralized network that is the internet.
If we want decentralization, why can't we just use the internet like ye olde days?
I get the convenience and also the security benefits, but there‘s a whole lot of risk, too.
> If we want decentralization, why can't we just use the internet like ye olde days?
I'm not sure how you come to this conclusion. The internet is indeed already decentralized, yet connected, allowing you to traverse networks to reach resources that are more often than not outside your 'home' network.
Federated social media is exactly that, but for posting and interacting with content. Its killer feature is that you don't have to create an account everywhere, but are able to interact from your home instance with any other instance in the network. Exactly like the internet.
If we'd go back to ye olde days, it would be like pre-internet from a network perspective. Having to log in physically on a specific network to access its resources. Or when talking about the internet until ~2008 (and to some extent still true): creating a separate account for every forum you'd want to participate in.
I fail to see how "but everybody is doing it" is a valid argument.
This is also a problem with mastodon. As well as the fact that instances constantly shut down or have insane admins.
Lemmy is probably taking on too large of a problem. No one has got federated systems to work as nicely as centralised ones yet.
They never will. Federated systems have certain advantages over centralised ones. One of the principal advantages is that it allows hosting costs to be shared more widely, which means you don't need a single entity with hundreds of thousands of dollars to maintain the thing. Another is that toxic communities can be more easily isolated from the rest (so that the communities you like don't become quickly overwhelmed by racists).
One of the disadvantages is that there is more friction than a single, centralised system. It is, by definition, not as seamless. The seams are the feature. It's just the trade-off you make.
It's not perfectly seamless, because I wanted to minimize the risk that it will redirect some non-lemmy site with matching URL structure/elements. However, I've tried to make it as seamless as possible.
... From a technical perspective. But most people don't care about that. It's a social network, and they want to use it as one. They already have the experience of reddit, where there's thousands of seamless communities and one account gives you access to all of them. Lemmy feels like a big step back for anyone who doesn't care about the technical details. Which is basically everyone.
I expect that Lemmy will grow and some of the frictions (bugs, unclear accounts, insane instance sysadmins, moderation tools at the community/magazine/subreddit level, moderation tools at the instance/server level, etc.) will decrease in time. The two biggest threats are 1) too many consuming-only users and 2) big-tech (im looking at you Facebook) deciding that they need to directly compete.
I would honestly say: "Fuck them"
The Web was a better place before it was too easy to use and the unwashed masses entered. If they don't want to learn... let them stay in their walled garden.
So no, it's not just "unwashed masses", it's people who value their time too much to spend it on some social media technical issues.
I'm not competent with tech (I'm not a developer, just a lurker on HN) and I find Mastodon as easy as email if you understand email.
What are these tech people competent about? Do they understand email, at least conceptually?
The problem is the apps people like to use are no longer available, and Reddit doesn't permit them to just accept user API keys instead
The comments suggest the API pricing was just a stunt to hide the fact that Reddit wanted to kill third party apps in general, and in particular the ability of third parties to use Reddit posts to train AI models.
That's not an option. Even if it was, reddit's tone death measures, such as undeleting accounts and threatening everyone and kicking out mods who protested, already killed the community and makes the decision of continuing to use Reddit as a questionable moral decision.
People seek a reddit alternative, and rewarding reddit for its bullshit stunts is not it.
But it isn't. People aren't looking for an alternative to email.
When's the last time you heard of Fastmail saying that they were now blocking all emails from Zoho because they didn't like the way a single Zoho user was using Zoho?
Yet this is the sort of thing we see in the Fediverse when one admin takes issue with another admins attitude.
I get defederating from known bad actors, but these days it's not uncommon to lose access to an instance because admin don't like other admin policies (ergo some defederation over "The_Donald")
It's a brand new technology and system, for the most part. Give them time to make it more user-friendly. It's worth it joining and participating now IMO, but I think in 6 months or a year it will be MUCH more friendly to the average Joe.
At the end of this all, the biggest mistake that Reddit will have made may be sending all the most talented devs creating apps for their platform to their direct competitors.
Everyone should be furious that Twitter was purchased by a billionaire to basically promote his own tweets and other viewpoints he agrees with. Reddit users shouldn’t be happy about a site that has only gotten worse for users over the years.
This is a key opportunity to fight against the enshittification of the internet and you’re on here complaining about creating multiple accounts… Ugh
1. Twitter was and still is a commercial product, not to mention publicly traded. Buying and selling it is completely fine and ordinary. It's nothing to feel furious about, especially if you aren't going to put up a competing offer.
2. Wouldn't you (and 99% of people) also spend money to amplify your opinions far and wide if you had such money? Hell, the entire reason most people use social media is because they want to amplify their opinions far and wide.
You’re seriously sticking up for some billionaire who bought what was effectively a public square of the internet to turn it into self promoting crap?
Are you also one of those people who said it was going to be great for free speech before he started banning journalists who criticized him?
Twitter is a commercial product, it is a private square to use your analogy. It can be and is bought and sold on the open market. If you don't like it, come on up and put up an offer like Musk did. If you don't have the money, tough luck; nothing to get furious over. If you do have the money but lose to another buyer, touch luck; nothing to get furious over.
Lest we forget, it's not like Twitter before Musk was about free speech either. In fact, it came to light that Twitter was, as previously rumored, manipulating things behind the scenes to promote certain topics of discussion above others. Musk coming in put a stop to a significant portion of that, which some regions like Japan especially appreciate to this day.
From the perspective of free speech and expression: He and everyone should be able to speak whatever he and they so desires.
This is the United States of America, not Russia or China. Even if you argue it's merely ostensibly, we espouse freedom around here.
One of the valuable aspects of freedom of speech is ideas can gain traction because of their virtue and not e.g because of force. Musk has no expertise in most of what he talks about. Yet he uses reach he has purely because of his wealth to spread misinformation. The marketplace of ideas is a complete joke if ideas spread just because of money.
No, I'd have much loftier goals to amplify my opinons than microblogs if I had $80b in my pocket. I could fund my own movies, games, TV series, etc. I could lobby congress to change laws on a worldwide scale. I could fund my own educational systems and shape minds the way I want to.
Using it to own a blogging platform for power's sake is absurd and also small-minded. I argue Trump did a good portion of damage to the modern discourse and he just had to be a user.
>the entire reason most people use social media is because they want to amplify their opinions far and wide.
I don't use Twitter, but my goals online are to communicate with like minded people. Not literally everyone. I don't need nor desire a soapbox, because it implies my ideals and methodologies are novel and capable of change. Not really.
Tbh I’m not sure what the main advantage of federation is if they all have the same subreddits (news, tech, pics, etc). It seems like it just fragments the userbase, I’d get it if each subreddit was one instance
Would much better understand if each 'subreddit' was something that was federated and could be defederated and users all moved to another instance.
But right now, it's just too fragmented.
I feel like similar things will happen in the forum fediverse (it’s what I call the fediverse alternatives to Reddit). There’s going to be a period of thrashing and churn. And then it’ll settle down with each community having its own vibe and we members get to try it out and settle where we want.
I would use the community browser at https://browse.feddit.de/ to find the most populated and active community, and stick with that one. If the other 2 aren't very active, maybe make a post in those communities letting them know there's a more active community at X.
The largest instances have a little duplication so there are something like 3 large gaming-related communities, 3 large world news communities, etc. This is not generally the case, for many topics communities on particular instances either "win out" so to speak in terms of subscribers or duplication doesn't exist.
- There are some ideas of "grouping" communities/subreddits to better dedup but still allow crossposting and discussion.
- There are some ideas of introducing moderation tools (currently the only tool is "defederation").
Most of this has not been developed as the 2 developers behind Lemmy were working on a "get paid to introduce milestone features" basis before the Reddit refugees came over. I expect this friction to iron out over time.
I hope that the threadiverse will consolidate into a bunch of themed instances instead of the current state of having 200 different Reddit clones.
The flaw of lemmy's design is that communities reside on a single service, so you will end up with multiple "Science" communities, because in the founding phase several people created such a community of the same name on multiple servers. They should instead have used a hashtag-based approach (granted, problem then is the tight-knit moderation that makes subreddits like AskHistorians so valuable), or implement something like communities subscribing to other communities (like a community-ring) etc.
That's not entirely true, some of the larger instances have no open federation policy, meaning the owner of the instance you are on has to get itself allowlisted in order to federate.
In practice this means that you can follow _some_ communities on _some_ other servers, but not all, and not every popular server.
Add that to the fact that some larger instances have stopped federating with each other and you have the current state; a minefield where your average user tries Lemmy, pastes a link into it's search box as instructed, nothing shows up and goes back to Reddit.
Kind of like with email, you don't need to have account with Gmail to send an email to friend on that server.
I like Lemmy in general, it's what you would expect from a Reddit clone... but because of this kind of stuff, it's really going to be a hard sell for anyone who's not fundamentally a "fediverse" fan who wants Reddit to burn.
In reality, it is used for that and the censorship of ideas server owners don't like... or even just blocking a server because the admins of each server had a spat. It has been likened to little fifedoms each with their own flavor of tyrant, a little drematic imo but not wholely wrong either.
Another use is if you want to use the software, but don't want/need connections to the greater network. So you fully defederate and only allow your friends to have logins to your isolated server.
I personally don't have the time or the energy to follow stupid turf wars and trying to find out who is federated with who.
It's super-neat, actually.
Change doesn't have to come overnight, or even soon. Better is not on a deadline. Society can adapt & improve slowly too, in difficult not easy win struggles. This article is about 0.025% of the planet signing up, mostly within a couple months. To me, one that that ain't bad! The growth trend isn't likely to continue apace but this like critical mass, like a seed successfully germinating, for a long life, that can bring who knows what.
But of course overwhelmingly negative doomsaying 'it'll never work' is the tried & true forever response to all efforts to do anything other than a couple centralized megaproperties. Everything is too hard for users at scale. Only bad can win. Resign. Give up. Don't try. Unless you have 3b+ users you shouldn't even try.
This is just going to be the same point forever & ever, anytime anything good might possibly happen.
Don't overthink which instance to choose. Just sign up for Lemmy.world or any of the other "general purpose" instance. It's not terribly important.
The one caveat to that is that you may want to choose beehaw instead if you strongly value a more heavily moderated experience. As I understand it, Beehaw intends to refederate once there are better moderation tools available on Lemmy but for now they are separated.
Having all the casual users left behind and siloed on Reddit would be glorious. Lol.
This is a feature in my opinion. Mass adoption has ruined so many sites (including reddit). It's taboo, but gatekeeping communities is absolutely required to stop mass adoption and the downward spiral. Reddit was better in 2010 than in 2020.
I tried to join a server.
Went through a long list of them. I was confused on which to pick, and if that decision mattered, and what would be the security implications of it.
I finally picked one reluctantly. The server was down.
Not a great feature. Feels more like a bug.
> Mass adoption has ruined so many sites (including reddit).
Nonsense. Mass adoption means it's the place to go to consume and produce content.
If the feature of Lemmy you single out as being better is that no one uses it then I'm not sure what would be the point of joining, or why are you promoting the service so that others join.
> Reddit was better in 2010 than in 2020.
No it wasn't. At best, it was different.
And people like me are leaving 2023 Reddit, not 2010 Reddit. What we want is an alternative to today's service, not nostalgia.
This is already a failure. There is no need to join unless you find a topic you want participate in. And you event don't have to, you can even use a mastodon (pleroma, friendica, e.t.c.) account if you already have it if you just want to leave a comment in a thread.
From the point of view of active Lemmy users, this is not a problem. Casual users don't contribute, so they're essentially just leeches from the point of view of the overall service. Kinda same thing as with pure FOSS. Non-contributing users are tolerated, but they are not really useful in any way.
Not at all. In fact it is the non contributing users that give value to your product. Imagine Firefox but without any end users. Similarly, reddit is valuable mostly because of the massive number of people viewing content on it. Youtube is valuable because of the huge number of people who just watch videos, never make anything.
The content creators, or contributors, will flock to wherever the non contributors are.
Firefox isn't FOSS in this argument in the way I mean, because they extract actual monetary value from their users.
And even if i just looked on non-contributing users in a utilitarian way, they are still useful for project brand recognition.
One Private/Public key-pair is all you need to fetch data from, and upload your own posts to all NOSTR relays.
The only complicating factor now is that, to prevent spam, some relays [0] are requiring a one time or recurring payment.
- Yes, it takes five minutes of research to figure that out. It might also take another five minutes of research to ensure you don't choose an extremist or troll instance that will get defederated from all the others. Yes, there is friction that wasn't there with Reddit. Convenience is not what Lemmy is optimised for. If you value convenience above all else then it's probably not for you.
The whole point of federation is to avoid the problems we're seeing with Facebook, with Instagram, with Reddit, with Twitter: control over your internet content. Not having a mega-corp bent on maximizing profits and using you as a milking cow, but instead have a say and have actual power in how communities are built and managed. It is 100% expected that Lemmy or KBin is different from Reddit. You say that's not a good user experience, but I challenge that assertion: I say it's not a bad UX, but it's a different UX, and you don't want to change. Well, if you don't want to change, stay on Reddit, that's not a problem. But if you're going to investigate what the fediverse is, please learn what it's about, how it's built. Don't expect to find the same old world you know, that's on purpose !
> It makes no sense to me at all
You're on HN, a forum where members pride themselves in being intelligent enough to dig around, learn by themselves, be different, hack around. You haven't made efforts understanding how the fediverse works, or why it's different, and your conclusion is _not_ that you should investigate, but that you should complain that it's too different. I don't understand this reasoning.
I think an issue in the mentality in this forum is that people mostly expect products, ie a package that is made by an entity and that is served to users. The package is expected to be complete, shiny, wonderful, the entity is expected to do whatever it takes to convince users. It's an asymmetry that is completely opposite to the whole concept of being a hacker, which is supposed to be the H of HN.
Here's a good post explaining what the fediverse is about: https://medium.com/@VirtualAdept/a-friendly-introduction-to-...
And here are a few links and resources if you want to go deeper: https://github.com/emilebosch/awesome-fediverse
This isn't to be gatekeeping, but I think trying to hope for some magical, identical reddit but without reddit's BS is both a fever dream and shortsighted. Do you believe Reddit2 to not fall into the same trap as reddit?
We'd need something different to prevent that, and different is going to be less intuitive than the familiar. It's fine if you don't want to be in that firsr wave of figuring out how to make different work, others will figure It out and communicate their findings.
This is an outstanding advantage. Let Reddit be Reddit with its eternal September and easy access for everyone. Lemmy could build smaller and much more useful and expert communities.
If one has something important to share, then finding an instance is no obstacle. If one just wants to mindlessly shitpost, then maybe it's good some social media sites will be worth too much effort for them to sign up.
Personally, I would like paid and privacy-respecting social media sites focused on experts in their fields. Much like academic journals, but with modern social media features and for industry experts and enthusiasts as well as academics in a wide variety of fields traditional and not - everyone who is willing to put some effort into what they spend time on. I think that 0 price of entry is unnatural. No one accepts people in their social circles who spend 0 effort on participating in a mutually-beneficial way. And yet on the internet, that's the only kind of social networking most of us can do.
So I say it's good we have a tiny test of effort for people who sign up to Lemmy. Socializing with 0 skin in the game is very unnatural and even if it's better in some philosophical way, the human brain hasn't evolved to deal with a massive amount of garbage that this kind of social networking brings. If you want to communicate something to a lot of people, the price of entry should be at least a modicum of effort.
And this is not some far-out untested idea, it worked very well in the 90s.
Actually you only need to join one lemmy instance, then you can just use that for everything.
And stuff like https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/469273-lemmy-universal-lin... would help not to use yours.
No casual user is ever going to leave Reddit for Lemmy. Even for myself I’m probably not going to use Lemmy because it seems stupid to have to join multiple “Lemmys” and make multiple accounts, this isn’t a good user experience. People are supposed to have separate accounts for every Lemmy? All the communities are disparate and separated? It makes no sense to me at all.