> We are individuals with our own opinions. If you disagree with these, it is no problem! You can still freely use the Lemmy software on different instances. If you host your own instance, we have no control over it at all and are unable to censor what users say.
Love this! This is the true spirit of FOSS software, and I hope more projects adopt this ethos.
Don't like how it works? Stop complaining and fork it. Don't like how it's being operated? Stop complaining and host your own instance!
3. Click through to any community on any instance that looks interesting and add its RSS feed to your client.
I don't know precisely what the future of Lemmy will be, I wish them well because they've produced a cool piece of software which is more open than Reddit and puts RSS front and center. But for the time being I simply have some Lemmy feeds right next to the old.reddit.com feeds in my RSS reader, pure win for me as a user. My universe grew and I don't have to have a horse in anyone's race. This is why we RSS.
There's money to be made in constantly ringing the outrage bell.
Remember Jordan Peterson talking about building a censorship-free Patreon[0]? That was 5 years ago. Never went through with it obviously, because Patreon is just one of many things that carnival barkers "content creators" can make hay with. Tomorrow, it'll probably be a Disney movie.
This bring me memories of when Google Reader closed. The existing back then alternatives got hammered badly by the relatively sudden massive influx of new users.
Still the numbers are low, and what users will find is something different from what they used to, but I think the more diverse landscape will push a change in how people use internet to connect each other and to content, beyond reddit/lemmy/etc kind of usage.
I remember when he first took over and he was all like: “I’m gonna listen to the community and do and AMA often”.
Beginning of this year they told devs: we’re not gonna mess with the API situation anytime soon. And then they did, but he: it makes sense and I’m sure the pricing will be reasonable.
Then the last three months happened. I’ve rarely seen goodwill burned so quickly.
The fediverse is an ok alternative for some people, but not all.
Just the past few days I was troubleshooting some Linux issues with my new installation and 90% of the useful search results I found were from reddit. If global text search is not implemented on the fediverse, then it's just gonna be useful for twitter like content, not reddit content.
Reddit has a 16-year head start in domain authority, search engines will be obviously do a better job of indexing their pages than a mostly new service. In time, alternative sources will be indexed and visible in search results as well.
As long as those issues persist (and the post title is likely a hard one), Reddit will always have an advantage since it's built to be more SEO friendly.
It's not about 16 years of SEO optimization, it's about a good chunk of the fediverse being opposed to search indexing because they have nightmare about bots:
That is about what I expected, honestly. Only the people who really care will migrate, just as with Mastodon. The vast majority don't care and will continue using Reddit.
Unsurprising at all. The lack or the reduction of 3rd part app and API access does not affect the vast majority of reddit users who use the official website and the official app. The vocal minority is unlikely to convince the majority users to boycott. The moderators who choose to keep any subreddit private extended period of time is effectively choosing to slowly kill off their subreddit, after which a replacement subreddit is likely to just spring forward and replace. I think this whole saga is emotional and irrational response.
When we have actually decentralized apps I believe we'll see much better adoption. The fediverse has all the worse parts of decentralization with none of the benefits. For example you can go to another instance where a community is mirrored and create an account with the same username as a prominent poster and impersonate them.
Most of the active users are non-power users who are flummoxed at why mods have shut down their favorite subreddits. They are complaining in droves. Lots of long-winded Facebook boomer-style rants about how they read the subreddit with their kids and they need it back up to entertain them.
Some subs are protesting the spez moderator removal threat by changing the topic of the sub entirely.
Meanwhile, most of the content producers seem to have fled the site and latest high quality serious content is a week old at this point.
I don’t see how Reddit recovers from this without losing a great deal of value for their shareholders. I’m expecting Huffman to resign based on how much he has damaged their monetization potential with advertisers.
Mastodon is unusable to me because I need two accounts to be parts of the math community and programming community.
N accounts for N interests I have. Doesn't work for me.
Reddit had subs. With one acocunt, I could sub to any number of interests. Twitter is flat. Again, I can get content from all areas of interest fron one account.
yes, and the moderation problems will start July 1st. 26k is nothing, for sure, to Reddit. But every movement starts small. For now, Reddit doesn't have to worry and Lemmy can up their game.
Also, what about kbin numbers? How many have stopped using Reddit, but didn't switch networks?
This one number doesn't mean much since Lemmy isn't Reddit's only problem.
As with Twitter, I suspect, most people won't 'migrate to a Reddit replacement' - they'll just use Reddit less.
They'll open it and find the app they have doesn't work, maybe install the official one but find it's different from their experience before, and just use it less.
Instead they'll go to other places - the ones they were already going to before - more, Discord, YouTube, TikTok, etc. Hacker News for programmers, etc.
It's not nothing, it's 27k. There's a point at which a social network has enough content to be usable. Reddit (to me) hasn't significantly increased in value since I started using it 15 years ago. People post the same links. Some of the conversations are a little better. The spam and reposting is a lot worse.
The number that matters isn't really what dents Reddit, but what gives Lemmy (or the fediverse as a whole) the critical mass to actually become viable.
27k isn't yet there. If I had to guess, I'd say maybe 200k is where you need to get to. You need niche topics of interest to say, 5% of the population to get communities of at least 10 active people who will post, comment and curate. If only 10% of people do that, you have to have a user base such that 0.5% of it can sustain an interesting content.
However it isn't uniform, so perhaps 27k is already enough for the very largest communities to get off the ground.
They might just be counting their instance. These things get way more complicated to figure out in a federated world (which is actually good in some respects). There are at least half a dozen instances where people are going to.
EDIT: someone posted below some stats showing it's at least roughly counting all instances. Quite surprising though I wonder if it's lagging a bit. Also keep in mind, for a good amount of time during the blackout they were down or had registration closed.
That's quite shocking. I run a push notification service and have ~25k daily active users, and it runs on a single 2 core machine with 2 GB RAM. I'm not saying that it's easy to run a service for so many users, but the largest of the Lemmy instance has ~3k users. That's super small, and a lot smaller than expected.
Maybe its just me but I'm not a massive fan of the lemmy 'front-page', it feels too squashed horizontally, and also too vertically spaced-out. The font feels too big,
Or maybe I just hate all change and want it to look more like old.reddit.com...
I have been trying out Tildes and I absolutely love their UI/UX! It’s minimal, very easy to read, yet offers great functionality. I think it can also be used with JS disabled.
HN could learn a bit from it (at least make the collapse button a slightly bigger target for mobile)
Yup. It's the main thing making me want to use kbin.social. Even there I had to use Stylebot to force a wider layout but the default is much better.
I can't quite understand what the obsession with narrow layouts is these days. It's not like most of these sites don't have separate mobile layouts. Are they really just lazy about design and can't be bothered testing reflow of their text?
There are a few thousand people who still pay for AOL dialup every month.[0] It was around 2 million back in 2015 but AOL has intentionally made it almost impossible to sign up for dialup. They primarily sell a "computer security" service these days and they still offer email addresses.
Readit News
Love this! This is the true spirit of FOSS software, and I hope more projects adopt this ethos.
Don't like how it works? Stop complaining and fork it. Don't like how it's being operated? Stop complaining and host your own instance!
1. Use the RSS client of your choice
2. Go to a master list of all federated Lemmy communities e.g. https://lemmy.world/communities/listing_type/All/page/1
3. Click through to any community on any instance that looks interesting and add its RSS feed to your client.
I don't know precisely what the future of Lemmy will be, I wish them well because they've produced a cool piece of software which is more open than Reddit and puts RSS front and center. But for the time being I simply have some Lemmy feeds right next to the old.reddit.com feeds in my RSS reader, pure win for me as a user. My universe grew and I don't have to have a horse in anyone's race. This is why we RSS.
There's money to be made in constantly ringing the outrage bell.
Remember Jordan Peterson talking about building a censorship-free Patreon[0]? That was 5 years ago. Never went through with it obviously, because Patreon is just one of many things that carnival barkers "content creators" can make hay with. Tomorrow, it'll probably be a Disney movie.
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/jordan-peterson-says-hell-la...
Still the numbers are low, and what users will find is something different from what they used to, but I think the more diverse landscape will push a change in how people use internet to connect each other and to content, beyond reddit/lemmy/etc kind of usage.
Which ironically was a service that centralised consumption of RSS, something that was designed to be decentralised.
It was alarming to watch adoption of Google Reader simply because it was more convenient than running one's own RSS client.
Beginning of this year they told devs: we’re not gonna mess with the API situation anytime soon. And then they did, but he: it makes sense and I’m sure the pricing will be reasonable.
Then the last three months happened. I’ve rarely seen goodwill burned so quickly.
Just the past few days I was troubleshooting some Linux issues with my new installation and 90% of the useful search results I found were from reddit. If global text search is not implemented on the fediverse, then it's just gonna be useful for twitter like content, not reddit content.
As long as those issues persist (and the post title is likely a hard one), Reddit will always have an advantage since it's built to be more SEO friendly.
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/261
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1285
https://fedsearch.io/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33546937
https://www.reddit.com/r/Mastodon/comments/131amhl/why_are_s...
That’s incredibly lower than I expected…
Some (eg me) will just stop using Reddit. I didn't need an alternative, I needed a reason to stop. The blackout gave me that.
You forget the third category of people, the ones who'll just mostly stop using Reddit without seeking a 1-to-1 alternative.
Most of the active users are non-power users who are flummoxed at why mods have shut down their favorite subreddits. They are complaining in droves. Lots of long-winded Facebook boomer-style rants about how they read the subreddit with their kids and they need it back up to entertain them.
Some subs are protesting the spez moderator removal threat by changing the topic of the sub entirely.
Meanwhile, most of the content producers seem to have fled the site and latest high quality serious content is a week old at this point.
I don’t see how Reddit recovers from this without losing a great deal of value for their shareholders. I’m expecting Huffman to resign based on how much he has damaged their monetization potential with advertisers.
N accounts for N interests I have. Doesn't work for me.
Reddit had subs. With one acocunt, I could sub to any number of interests. Twitter is flat. Again, I can get content from all areas of interest fron one account.
Also, what about kbin numbers? How many have stopped using Reddit, but didn't switch networks?
This one number doesn't mean much since Lemmy isn't Reddit's only problem.
They'll open it and find the app they have doesn't work, maybe install the official one but find it's different from their experience before, and just use it less.
Instead they'll go to other places - the ones they were already going to before - more, Discord, YouTube, TikTok, etc. Hacker News for programmers, etc.
27k isn't yet there. If I had to guess, I'd say maybe 200k is where you need to get to. You need niche topics of interest to say, 5% of the population to get communities of at least 10 active people who will post, comment and curate. If only 10% of people do that, you have to have a user base such that 0.5% of it can sustain an interesting content.
However it isn't uniform, so perhaps 27k is already enough for the very largest communities to get off the ground.
EDIT: someone posted below some stats showing it's at least roughly counting all instances. Quite surprising though I wonder if it's lagging a bit. Also keep in mind, for a good amount of time during the blackout they were down or had registration closed.
Tell you what, go find a subreddit like r/nba which has been locked down for days and find the thread where mods are reopening the subreddit.
See what the mood is among the users.
People here and moderators there have GREATLY misread the mood of the people on the platform.
Even worse, in many subreddits, the moderators were still posting to their own subs and forgot to clean up after themselves.
That's quite shocking. I run a push notification service and have ~25k daily active users, and it runs on a single 2 core machine with 2 GB RAM. I'm not saying that it's easy to run a service for so many users, but the largest of the Lemmy instance has ~3k users. That's super small, and a lot smaller than expected.
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Or maybe I just hate all change and want it to look more like old.reddit.com...
HN could learn a bit from it (at least make the collapse button a slightly bigger target for mobile)
I can't quite understand what the obsession with narrow layouts is these days. It's not like most of these sites don't have separate mobile layouts. Are they really just lazy about design and can't be bothered testing reflow of their text?
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Content first on landing page.
Not "what's an instance?"
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy
Meanwhile, there are grandmas out there that still talk about “hearing from the grandkids through [their] AOL”.
[0]: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/03/aol-1point5-million-people-s...
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