[HN Gopher] Lemmy stats (users, posts, nodes, comments)
___________________________________________________________________
Lemmy stats (users, posts, nodes, comments)
Author : Paul-Craft
Score : 175 points
Date : 2023-06-20 13:09 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (the-federation.info)
(TXT) w3m dump (the-federation.info)
| seanalltogether wrote:
| I keep giving lemmy a try and I couldn't figure out what was
| bugging so much about browsing it. I finally realized I'm only
| seeing about 7 posts per window on lemmy as opposed to 12 on
| reddit. And now I'm realizing the content box is only 800px wide
| so comments feel really constrained. This seems like a weird
| style choice?
| Aachen wrote:
| This is also one of the main reasons I hate using Signal. It's
| a tiny css change, but seeing only 4 chats and 6 messages per
| screen is just way less usable than double the amount on
| Telegram or Wire.
|
| For websites, though, it's a lot easier to add custom css. If
| that's your main gripe, you're one browser extension away from
| a fix
| nomilk wrote:
| > For websites, it's a lot easier to add custom css ...
| you're one browser extension away from a fix
|
| Any recommendations for chrome/safari extensions? Never done
| it before but keen to try.
| dota_fanatic wrote:
| Not sure about Safari, but Stylus works very well for
| Chrome/FF.
|
| https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stylus/clngdbkpkp
| e...
| camel-cdr wrote:
| I'm not good enough with css, but I pretty sure if you figure
| out a more compact design, lemmy-ui will very likely include
| it.
| cwkoss wrote:
| With users growing 6x in a week, I imagine we'll start seeing a
| proliferation of clients in the coming months.
| nologic01 wrote:
| Keep in mind this is not "lemmy vs reddit". Browsing through this
| index [1] you see moderators and users migrate also to platforms
| like kbin, discord, discourse and matrix
|
| I didn't even know about kbin [2] but it seems like another solid
| fediverse presence. This multiplicity of platforms (ruby, php,
| rust, python, go, elixir, you name it) that all adhere to a
| protocol is intrinsic to this "movement" [3] and it is what makes
| it vaguely... inspiring. Echoes of an earlier, more optimistic
| time.
|
| [1] https://sub.rehab/
|
| [2] https://kbin.pub/en
|
| [3] https://fedidb.org/software
| class4behavior wrote:
| https://lemmyverse.net/ is also a good place for finding either
| Lemmy instances or communities while on
| https://fediverse.party/ you can find links to the most
| important resources regarding the main platforms on the
| fediverse.
| speg wrote:
| I'm getting frustrated with Lemmy. I've tried to reply to a post
| this morning and the submit button just spins. No error, nothing.
|
| This is a bad bug, but there are plenty other small things. Like
| why is "Join Lemmy" link still displayed when I'm logged in?
|
| Feels like unbaked software to me. That's on top of all the
| multiple federated instances you need to wrap your head around.
|
| I'm not sure this can compete :(
| gnulinux wrote:
| The reality in 2023 is all software is unbaked software. All
| software is buggy, frustrating, and almost-broken to the point
| of almost-unusable. There is simply nothing else, and we all
| navigate through this dystopic universe by finding software
| that are tolerably frustrating for each of us. The threshold is
| different for everyone. Reddit is buggy as hell and experiences
| downtime most weeks. I'm sure Lemmy has bugs too, but it's all
| about whether the trade-off makes sense for a critical mass of
| people. We will see.
| elihu wrote:
| I think the important thing is the trajectory. Is it getting
| better over time, or worse? It seems like a lot of software
| eventually hits a peak and starts a long, slow decline --
| especially internet services and social media platforms.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| If that's on lemmy.world, they just announced that they
| discovered a debugging option they forgot enabled, and now it's
| working much better :)
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| Any platform will experience growing pains when their userbase
| increases dramatically. Even Reddit was frequently crashing
| when it acquired Digg's users, and still does from time to
| time.
|
| I for one I'm very glad federated platforms are starting to
| pick up steam, and willing to weather the glitches. It feels
| like a return to the old Internet, where users had the control
| instead of a handful of megacorporations and
| investors/stockholders.
| elaus wrote:
| > Feels like unbaked software to me.
|
| I mean... it is. A few weeks ago the user base was very small
| and there was very little activity on Github (bug reports,
| feature requests, additional developers). Now there is a
| flourishing community and a lot of pull requests from new
| developers, leading to many smaller and bigger improvements.
|
| The timing could've been better as the Lemmy devs were in the
| middle of a bigger refactoring (getting rid of websockets),
| which hindered development and the release of new versions. But
| I for once are happy with how active the development is.
| markstos wrote:
| I read that bug was fixed recently, at least on lemmy.world.
| They accidentally left federation debugging on, so federating
| the post was happening in the foreground instead of the
| background, so your post probably succeeded and you were
| waiting for federation of the message to complete.
| binwiederhier wrote:
| > I'm getting frustrated with Lemmy.
|
| I am too, but I am sticking with it for now. It is really hard
| to ignore all the horrible horrible bugs, though.
|
| > I've tried to reply to a post this morning and the submit
| button just spins. No error, nothing.
|
| I have the same issue. I always always copy the text I've
| written before submitting on Lemmy, because it happens so often
| that it just swallows the text and my comment is gone forever.
|
| I have noticed that manually setting the language to "English"
| (below the text box) somehow reduces the failure rate
| significantly. No idea why.
|
| Other things I have issues with:
|
| - The "Hot" ordering on my instance is never updated. The
| newest "Hot" post is 4 days old by now and it never changes
| anymore. Not sure what happened 4 days ago, but I can only
| browse by "New" or "Active". The "Active" browsing is dumb,
| because I think every new comment is bumping it up again, and
| "New" only gets you the brand new stuff that nobody has
| commented on yet. "Hot" would really be my preference, but
| that's broken...
|
| - The commenting issues described above. If I don't set the
| language, I sometimes see "language_not_allowed", and sometimes
| the text just vanishes. The Android app isn't working anymore
| because of this. It won't let me set the language and it won't
| let me post or comment.
|
| - Subscribing to other communities is painful. The UX is not
| there yet. You can't just subscribe. Instead you have to
| manually copy the URL to the search box and let your instance
| discover the community, and then you can subscribe.
|
| - Missing comments/posts: When subscribing to a new community,
| you won't ever receive old comments for posts. You'll see new
| comments come in, but there is no sync mechanism (not even a
| manual one) to retrieve the old stuff. This leaves you with an
| incomplete view of the world.
|
| - Missing comments/posts (part two): Even if you have
| subscribed for a long time, comments and post will not have all
| comments always, either because of a delay of minutes (or
| hours!), or just because of bugs, idk. It's annoying.
|
| - Security: There are some bad security issues [example:
| https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3060], which is
| obvious in the early stages of a piece of complicated software
| like this. But still. I think the reckoning will come
| eventually now that Lemmy is on the radar.
|
| - Privacy: There are a number of privacy concerns, namely that
| posts can never truly be deleted, and that things are public
| that should not be (like likes/dislikes). See
| https://discuss.ntfy.sh/comment/51609
|
| - ... (more, but the post is too long already)
| teepo wrote:
| Well if we hugged the stats page to death, as it appears to me,
| some of us will need more context. Like what is Lemmy?
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| Lemmy, like kbin or mastodon, is a frontend to federated social
| media, ie ActivityPub. Lemmy is made to feel more or less like
| Reddit, while Mastodon is made to feel more or less like
| Twitter, and kbin is sort of in the middle and feels oriented
| to news aggregation, but they all interoperate over
| ActivityPub.
|
| "Federated" means someone can pop up an instance, and even if
| the server isn't hosting any content, it can act your "view"
| into the fediverse.
| agilob wrote:
| Lemmy: the latest news about Reddit
| juujian wrote:
| Could Lemmy have something akin to r/all? I have always used
| Reddit more to discover new contents, trends, and communities
| then to check up on communities i already know (with a few
| exceptions).
| rdschouw wrote:
| You mean this?
| https://lemmy.world/home/data_type/Post/listing_type/All/sor...
| juujian wrote:
| Yeah, though this is even better: https://lemmy.world/home/da
| ta_type/Post/listing_type/All/sor...
|
| Kind of broken though, it keeps showing new posts at the top
| when they are posted, which should not happen when you sort
| for Top Posts of the Day. Any place to report bugs?
| sputter_token wrote:
| https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues
| ehutch79 wrote:
| Very memorable.
| camel-cdr wrote:
| You filter through all, local and subscribed community posts on
| your statepage. The sorting in general needs a bit of work
| though.
| skyfaller wrote:
| Yet another stats page, this one includes kbin too:
|
| https://fedidb.org/current-events/threadiverse
|
| Lemmy and kbin are theoretically both compatible with each other,
| as well as with less-closely related projects like Mastodon,
| because they are all part of the Fediverse using the same
| ActivityPub standard protocol. (In practice, there are bugs
| because this is alpha software, and some aspects of running a
| link aggregator aren't in the ActivityPub standard and thus
| implementations differ, but it's really cool when federation
| works between different codebases.)
| stemlord wrote:
| Would like to see reddit stats
| rvz wrote:
| Let's give Lemmy some time to see if people would stick around
| and abandon Reddit for good in the next 6 months.
|
| Then we will see how strong Reddit's network effect is against
| a new 'alternative' to take a significant amount of Reddit's
| daily active users.
| perihelions wrote:
| https://subredditstats.com/
| VWWHFSfQ wrote:
| I'm sure Reddit is prepared for a small contraction in their
| active userbase while also seeing a significant increase in
| monetizability of the remaining users.
| Aachen wrote:
| My thinking as well. Let's encourage everyone to make the
| exodus not small.
|
| Especially when you're a creator, you're an audience
| multiplier and it's worth pointing people to an alternative
| social site where they can _also_ find your content.
|
| I'd consider myself a creator, but it's all hobby and not
| commercial in the slightest. If you're commercial, I
| understand staying on reddit, but at least consider opening
| up a second profile elsewhere and pointing people there
| (while continuing to bet on both horses, so the audience can
| choose and you keep the audience either way).
| randomdata wrote:
| A small number of users provide what attracts the rest of the
| userbase. It will be interesting to see which small group
| leaves.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| Those users aren't leaving the platform. They have no
| incentive to do so. Hard to gain imaginary internet points
| on a slow, broken federated system.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| There's a similar list here https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list
| garrettjoecox wrote:
| A bit off topic, but why does it seem like not a single page on
| this site uses caching of any sort?
|
| Every time it's brought up and I click into it I'm met with
| minute(s) long loading screens. Surely they aren't pulling all of
| these stats from every node every single page load right?
| BashiBazouk wrote:
| Odd. I think it might be something else. I've been lurking
| Lemmy as I decide what to do about reddit and have not noticed
| any unusual loading times. The page linked to above takes two
| seconds to load (the spinny things stop turning and the data is
| given) for me. Literally, a 1-1000, 2-1000 and it's up...
| taywrobel wrote:
| I don't think this is off topic, because this is a common theme
| across all of Lemmy. Not necessarily no caching, but abysmal
| performance across the board.
|
| As much as I want the project to succeed it's unusable
| currently, and with more Reddit communities coming back from
| the blackout, their opportunity to claim the user base in the
| long run is already passed.
|
| The stats over the last month are impressive (if you can get
| them to load), but it's going to be a flash in the pan if they
| can't make the website function, and I fear the ship has
| already left the dock.
| ekanes wrote:
| > with more Reddit communities coming back from the blackout,
| their opportunity to claim the user base in the long run is
| already passed
|
| Perhaps, but on June 30th Apollo (most likely) goes dark. So
| there may be another group of folks checking it out.
| stev-0 wrote:
| Honestly, performance isn't all that bad for me. Not much
| worse than Reddit anyways.
| minorninth wrote:
| I've experienced that too for sure, but https://lemmy.world/
| has been pretty responsive for me.
|
| Keep in mind this is a little different than other social
| networks - there isn't a single centralized server so if you
| hit the software on a server that's underpowered or not
| configured properly, you'll get a very different experience.
| londons_explore wrote:
| To be fair, load testing is hard to get right. Plenty of well
| resourced and smart teams screw it up, and have outages due
| to scaling issues.
|
| And the team behind Lemmy didn't exactly get much notice
| either, so they might not have even tried to get stuff to
| scale well.
| distcs wrote:
| Exactly! And also keep in mind that all of this is open
| source created by volunteers like you and me in their free
| time. Imagine you and me working on a side project like
| this during weekends. We will probably be focusing on
| implementing the protocol right, fixing all those rendering
| and mundane CSS issues, making sure the login and session
| management does not have security holes. Essentially get
| all the functional stuff right. And one day Reddit makes
| some crazy announcement which drives hoardes of people to
| our little project. Pretty sure we'll not be prepared
| enough to deal with scaling issues due to the sudden influx
| of new users.
| afavour wrote:
| All of what you're saying is correct but so is what the
| OP said.
|
| It's very difficult for a volunteer run operation to
| scale up at short notice. The same time Lemmy has to if
| it wants to capture disaffected Reddit users.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Reddit is still in the process of making bad moves I
| think; unless I missed something and they announced a
| reversal of the API pricing changes?
|
| Lemmy should grow at a sustainable pace. The population
| boom from the blackouts is transient. As the moderators
| on Reddit get less enthusiastic about doing free work for
| a company that clearly doesn't like them and will happily
| take away their tools, some will give up. The communities
| there will get less well taken care of, eventually users
| will notice, and there should be a slow trickle out.
| That's the sustainable stream Lemmy should try to
| capture.
|
| Or none of this will happen and Reddit will go back to
| normal, in which case fine, who cares, right?
| balder1991 wrote:
| I feel like the population boom was enough to enable a
| few communities to settle in Lemmy and now they'll grow
| more organically. So far I'm enjoying the quality of
| posts there, it's definitely a situation where quality
| over quantity makes sense.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| honestly strikes me as a HN sorta thing where there is a
| small group of motivated and technically savvy types.
| noise-to-signal ratio is pretty good, and overt or covert
| 'hailcoporate' sorta stuff is not especially common.
| balder1991 wrote:
| Just some more info, they were working on Lemmy full
| time.
|
| Source: https://join-
| lemmy.org/news/2023-06-17_-_Update_from_Lemmy_a...
| littlestymaar wrote:
| Yeah, the _two of them_ ...
| shagie wrote:
| Its a matter of setting the expectation of involvement.
|
| This isn't two people working on it on the weekend as a
| hobby project that got too much attention during an
| unforeseen event.
|
| Rather, it is two people who worked on it as a full time
| job (no other sources of income) from grants for three
| years (with funding running out this year).
|
| For a rough estimate, one would expect about 10,000 hours
| have been put into the project (2 people, 2000 hours a
| year, 2.5 years).
|
| It is less of a hobby project than Minecraft was in 2012.
| thatwasunusual wrote:
| > To be fair, load testing is hard to get right.
|
| Load _testing_ is easy.
|
| The problem is to handle load, and cache invalidation is
| _extremely_ hard.
| londons_explore wrote:
| To be fair, load testing is hard to get right. Plenty of well
| resourced and smart teams screw it up, and have outages due
| to scaling issues.
|
| And the handful of unpaid developers behind Lemmy didn't
| exactly get much notice either, so they might not have even
| tried to get stuff to scale well.
| shagie wrote:
| > unpaid developers behind Lemmy
|
| They're paid, though they're having trouble scaling to the
| support issues.
|
| https://join-
| lemmy.org/news/2023-06-17_-_Update_from_Lemmy_a...
|
| > ...
|
| > For the past three years dessalines and I have been
| funded to work on Lemmy full-time by generous support from
| the NLnet foundation. These donations are paid out when we
| implement certain new features. But now we are busy
| answering questions, reviewing pull requests and
| urgentlyfixing problems. That means we are unable to work
| on the milestones agreed with NLnet, and won't receive
| payments from them. We are increasingly reliant on user
| donations to pay our bills. These donations currently add
| up to 1500 Euros per month, which is not even enough to pay
| minimum wage for the two of us. Hopefully more users can
| consider donating, so that we can put our full attention to
| making Lemmy better for everyone, and possibly add more
| developers to our worker co-op in the future.
| Nexxxeh wrote:
| For me, I find Reddit also often abysmal.
|
| Their performance has always been hit and more often miss. I
| was a fairly heavy user, a lot less now. From the hilariously
| shite search results, to their alien equivalent of the fail
| whale showing up a few times a month at least. Sometimes a
| refresh resolves, sometimes doing something else and then
| coming back later resolves it.
|
| Don't get me started on the new UI, or how the old less awful
| UI loves to drag me back into the new extra shit one.
|
| I don't know if I'm being more demanding, or extra pissy, or
| what. Is this not most people's experience of Reddit?
|
| And they've had millions of dollars and nearly two decades to
| unfuck it. I still remember the /r/bestof post (linking to
| /r/askreddit) that taught us "502, it went through; 504, try
| once more." because commenting was occasionally a total dice
| roll and the error messages were obtuse.
|
| If I have to eat some lag in the early days of Lemmy or
| wherever, so be it. I'm fed up with Reddit's shit, I'll try
| someone else's.
| raybb wrote:
| Don't have a link now but as I understand it the main problem
| is they were using websockets and it didn't scale to so many
| users. So they're switching to rest api calls and that should
| fix a lot of the issues. But it's a pretty big switch they've
| been working hard on.
| ehutch79 wrote:
| Shouldn't rest (or graphql) be the default? with realtime
| updates being a progressive enhancement?
| shagie wrote:
| Note that what amounts to a single page app with all the
| links rendered after fetching some data from a service
| isn't going to be something that can be indexed by a
| search engine.
|
| A google search for site:lemmy.ml with it rendered this
| way will _never_ result in any data.
|
| This may or may not be a good thing since it isn't
| necessarily assured that the data is stored for extended
| periods of time (compare: https://masto.host/mastodon-
| content-retention-settings/ ).
|
| Part of the value that people have ascribed to Reddit is
| being able to do searches for a product review and limit
| it to just pages served by reddit. Lemmy appears to be
| ephemeral and not searchable.
|
| Discussing the current Star Trek SNW episode may be ok,
| but reading a discussion from a few years ago about
| Emissary on DS9 ( https://www.google.com/search?q=deep+sp
| ace+nine+emissary+sit... ) is something that isn't going
| to be doable.
| ehutch79 wrote:
| I'm not sure what any of that has to do with using
| websockets by default vs traditional rest data fetching?
| shagie wrote:
| You can cache some REST requests which would reduce the
| load of serving them out of the web socket request each
| time.
|
| More importantly though (with either of these) is that
| when Google looks at the page, there are no links for it
| to traverse or index.
|
| This also means that the site/community isn't
| discoverable from a random person searching for it
| inhibiting organic growth.
|
| For example, if you do https://www.google.com/search?rls=
| en&q=where+to+discuss+star... it will likely never return
| a link to Lemmy (it may return pages that link to lemmy -
| like the reddit page), but not lemmy itself.
| randomdata wrote:
| Choosing a random Lemmy instance, I see server rendered
| content and <a href> links that are followable. Searching
| for 'site:<instance domain>' on Google turns up plenty of
| results, very much identical to what I see when searching
| for 'site:reddit.com'. Google seems to have no trouble
| indexing the site.
|
| I expect you won't see results on Google, save for when
| you explicitly ask for the site, because there isn't much
| in the way of reputation. You are highly unlikely to see
| my personal blog, which is just plain old boring as it
| gets HTML, come up in search results for the same reason.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| It looks like kbin is a more traditional php program, so
| should be indexable?
| shagie wrote:
| Yes, except that they've blocked it for crawlers that
| honor that.
|
| https://pagespeed.web.dev/analysis/http-kbin-
| social/ckiwikap...
|
| > CRAWLING AND INDEXING
|
| > Page is blocked from indexing
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Well, I'd say that the graph completely explains the problem.
|
| (But there are no _minutes_ loading screens. Some 10s happen,
| not minutes aren 't happening.)
| tedunangst wrote:
| It's not pulling stats remotely every request, but probably
| hitting the database with a dozen queries. Caching and
| optimization is not often a priority in this space.
|
| https://codeberg.org/thefederationinfo/the-federation.info
| smcleod wrote:
| Looks like it's down? Or very slow perhaps?
| nonethewiser wrote:
| [flagged]
| elaus wrote:
| The HN hug of death is really not specific to the Fediverse.
| smcleod wrote:
| I don't find the mastodon instance I use to be slow, it's a
| heck of a lot faster than say - reddit.
| Paul-Craft wrote:
| ~277k users, up from ~51k on June 1
|
| 319 nodes, up from 84 on June 1
|
| Sure, this is nothing compared to Reddit's userbase, but we'll
| see in a couple weeks how big this will get.
| nologic01 wrote:
| This is quite remarkable.
|
| It not just the numbers. Those are likely opinionated reddit
| users that will help the platform go faster through its baby
| steps.
| ActionHank wrote:
| I've been planning a jump across, but have been waiting it out
| to see if they see the error of their ways.
|
| Thus far they just keep jumping from one awful talking point to
| the next like a toddler trying to rationalize bad behaviour.
| chongli wrote:
| _I 've been planning a jump across_
|
| 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?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Why not just create a lemmy account and try it out?_
|
| 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.
| dragontamer wrote:
| 100% agree. These are the real issues with Lemmy that
| need to be discussed. I feel like I've seen your comments
| before... my understanding of you is that you'd probably
| enjoy the https://programming.dev, although the signup
| process there is a bit harder.
|
| The admins at https://Lemmy.world continues to fix
| various bugs / performance issues.
|
| ----------
|
| 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.
|
| ---------
|
| 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.
| chongli wrote:
| _100% agree. These are the real issues with Lemmy that
| need to be discussed._
|
| 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.
| dragontamer wrote:
| I can agree on that too.
|
| 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.
|
| --------
|
| 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.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| Are you finding one community more pragmatic than the
| other?
|
| 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.
| dragontamer wrote:
| I haven't played with kbin.social yet. Most of my
| interactions with them have been through Lemmy (and
| noticing that users/communities are actually from
| kbin.social)
|
| 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.
|
| --------
|
| 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.
| bigyikes wrote:
| It's because Lemmy isn't actually compelling outside of a
| few niche circles.
| dragontamer wrote:
| In my experience, private instances of PhpBB forums
| provide niche webtools that are necessary for community
| building that Reddit could never replace.
|
| 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.
|
| -----------
|
| 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.
| chongli wrote:
| The same can be said about Reddit. I'm not subscribed to
| any of the big subreddits there. I use it for niche
| communities. To me, that's the whole point!
|
| 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.
| rgreekguy wrote:
| I'm on the same plane as that guy.
|
| 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.
| izzydata wrote:
| I think those are two independent actions. They would
| probably delete their reddit data regardless of Lemmy
| working out or not.
| Aachen wrote:
| Same-ish, but:
|
| 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.
| AlexAndScripts wrote:
| How did you get the tildes invite?
| Paul-Craft wrote:
| I'm blanking out my 10 year old account (after requesting my
| data dump) sometime around the first if they don't do
| something to reverse course.
| accrual wrote:
| I was curious to see HN's view on removing Reddit account
| data. I have a couple old accounts (>12 years) with many
| thousands of comments. My personal perspective is that
| deleting all these comments, some of which contain
| technical help, advice, solutions, etc., would really be a
| net-negative for everyone.
|
| 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.
| Nexxxeh wrote:
| I've been helped by old posts from others on Reddit and
| elsewhere. It seems like a dick move to delete mine.
| deevious wrote:
| I requested GDPR exports for my accounts 8 days ago,
| nothing turned up yet. I have shreddit lined up to run as
| soon as I get my zips.
| Paul-Craft wrote:
| I've heard of multiple people who have done the same and
| have had the same problem. It seems either so many people
| are requesting their data that it's bogging down the
| process, Reddit is deliberately slow-playing it, or both.
| samstave wrote:
| Does one have to be an EU citizen to request via GDRP?
|
| 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.
| bogwog wrote:
| It doesn't really matter if lemmy kills reddit. If a new
| community grows and survives after this whole thing, that's a
| win for everybody.
| samstave wrote:
| Im really suprised nobody has recommended Saiddit... however,
| reddit admins went and setup accounts there early on...
| rkangel wrote:
| Yes. I spent last week hoping that everyone from Reddit moves
| to Lemmy, but I realised that I don't need Reddit to die, I
| just need Lemmy to be successful _enough_. There is a
| critical mass of people needed to sustain a set of useful
| sublemmys, but that number is a tiny fraction of Reddit.
| Kye wrote:
| That's the neat thing about federation. A lot of these
| people are coming from the million plus users of Mastodon
| who didn't need to make a new account to use Lemmy.
|
| 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.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Exactly. And there are some instances with people that really
| care about some subjects... a bit like Reddit 10 years ago.
| Those are prone to create something great.
| NoboruWataya wrote:
| Exactly. To me, all this talk of whether Lemmy will replace
| Reddit is a distraction. 90% of what is on Reddit is (in my
| opinion) crap, I would be happy if it stayed on Reddit or
| went somewhere else entirely. All I want to know is whether
| Lemmy can reach a critical mass where there is enough going
| on there that it's worth visiting.
| technothrasher wrote:
| > 90% of what is on Reddit is (in my opinion) crap
|
| 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")
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _all this talk of whether Lemmy will replace Reddit is a
| distraction_
|
| 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.
| dragontamer wrote:
| Beehaw.org has a difficult onboarding process by design.
| And I welcome their experimentation.
|
| 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.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Beehaw.org has a difficult onboarding process by
| design_
|
| 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 and the content leaves
| much to desire.) 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.
| dragontamer wrote:
| > 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).
|
| ---------
|
| 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.
| burnished wrote:
| I don't know that I'd call it kafka-esque but I think
| they make a good point about friction - the signup
| process also includes learning about this new thing,
| which is going to throw people.
|
| Especially, I think, because there is a gulf between what
| the service intends to be and what people want it to be.
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