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Reddit communities with millions of followers plan to extend the blackout indefinitely
(www.theverge.com)
this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2023
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Technology
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The major Star Trek subs all have. Started their own Lemmy instance (startrek.website) and have their private message directing folks over.
Well they uave been familiar with the Federation for very long time.
Take your upvote and go.
You know, I wonder if that was in all seriousness actually part of it, because they do have positive associations with the word federation, and that's the same effect marketing mainly tries to achieve. Might make people just that little bit more interested in it and more willing to work through any troubles getting used to a new system.
Damn it… yeah take your upvote…
I see what you did there. Keep doing this here an you will prosper. 🖖
that would explain why Im suddenly seeing a ton of star trek posts on my federated feed, I mean Id expect some but Ive seen a lot more all of a sudden
LOL That would be me bringing them into the federation LMAO
More star trek fans in the fediverse = awesome, imo. Welcome aboard, and thanks.
As somebody who isn't even a Star Trek fan, I still think a flood of trekkies is infinitely cooler than a flood of white supremacists which have killed similar platforms.
That's awesome. Starting a community is cool but starting their own instance is next level.
That is awesome! how soon until Beehaw is federated with them?
Oh nice I was looking for a good Trek community. Did ~~/r/tuvixinstitute~~ /r/daystrominstitute move over?
They did! [email protected] is Daystrom. [email protected] is the mainsub, and [email protected] is the meme/shitpost sub!
How do I get to those from your comment? I clicked them and it just opened Gmail and decided the links were the addresses lol.
in the search tool of your instance enter [email protected] and it will find it and start federating it.
This only proves that you can't unilaterally migrate a subreddit. That instance currently has ~250 users. I don't know how active the subs it represents were, but surely they had at least an order of magnitude more active users than that?
Since it's based around a show, Trek as a whole is in a show lull until Thursday. The folks who normally run the weekly content posts have already migrated over. There has been half a dozen attempts at replacing r/startrek with versions of it not run by that mod team and all have failed to gain traction, so good luck to anyone trying to do that. They run a tight ship and make it one of the more enjoyable subs on the site.
Trekkies have existed in groups in one form or another since Usenet and BBS. Moving to a new technology is nothing new to us.
That being said, 250 users in 1 day (they didnt get it set up and actually open until last night) is nothing to scoff at.
Edit: As of now (2am ET on Wednesday) they're at 800+ subscribers to the mainsub. That's-- not bad at all.
Oh nice! I'm gonna have to follow them on here too- now I just need other subs for my interests (cars, aquariums, etc) and shitposting sites (dccirclejerk, batman arkham) to make their way here
Does anybody know yet if you are allowed to criticize startrek on those communities? I had a major problem with /r/startrek in that you couldn’t say anything less than glowingly positive or you were banned. Like, not even about the whole woke bullshit, you couldn’t even say the writing was below par - banned.
I just wanna talk about startrek, both the good and the glaringly bad lol.
You could always criticize them, you just couldn't be lazy about your criticism.
I've many times talked about the inconsistency in character development, the trend to "give backstory and then kill a character," and the absolutely nauseating camera movement (especially in the early seasons) of Discovery, for example. Never even got a warning, nor my posts removed.
There was a major thread like a year back talking about how in Disco, the actors don't actually move about a scene when they do things. The movement is from room to room, and then they are stuck in place as they talk and it really throws you out of it.
Edit: In fact, there's literally a post critiquing season 4 of Discovery right now on their front page with healthy discussion in the comments.
All of these were allowed before and still.
I would be cautious too if I were a sub owner and guiding people to an alternative honestly. Lemmy and Kbin both are relatively unstable right now, even if they are pretty good. Waiting a little to see which instances are more stable and likely to last is a good move before planting people somewhere and making an official replacement sub.
This is the main issue I see right now as well. I created my own instance for my account to live on, just so I know it will be there as long as I want it to. But that doesn't do anything for communities I'm subscribed to that could, potentially, be on an instance that later goes down.
I think communities of similar topics are going to need to coordinate in the long run, and perhaps run their own instance to house their communities. This way the folks running the community and the folks hosting it are one in the same. You'd have instances that mainly house users, and perhaps a community or two. That's where most folks would have their main account. Then you'd have instances that mainly house content, with few users besides the moderation/admin team(s).
I think what would help is the introduction of multisubreddit equivalent for lemmy and then allowing similar duplicate communities to have the option of linking up with each other so people can subscribe to public multisubreddit. So regardless of what instance a community is on if it's like a technology community it'll display all the technology community duplicates.
Dude what a great idea I hope that's on a roadmap
That is brilliant. A sort of sub-federation within the grander federated instances. Subfeds (you heard it here first!) could feed off of and into each other, so if one instance goes dark it’s community and content are not lost as they’ve been replicated across the Fediverse. Sort of a cross between multisubs and RAID.
I am gonna be honest but instances going down and losing communities could have the same probability as Reddit shutting down Subreddits just because they feel like it.
I understand your concern, but I think it would first be wise to let some communities flourish and look how it holds up in the grand scheme of things.
How about extending the software so that communities replicate between sets of servers over time? That way, things are more robust even if one server goes down.
That and there is some rapid development for the apps going on right now. Lemmy definitely still needs some UI improvements and has a bunch of little problems which could turn away new users prematurely. So it would be good if there was some advertisement in July when the reddit apps shut down.
Fittingly I had two rewrite this comment and another comment 10 minutes ago because I got errors when trying to send them..
I mean...Reddit was taken offline by subs going private, and they had forewarning this was going to happen. Lemmy is handling a veritable monsoon of new users
This will be like the YT changes in 2017 only much sharper. The utility of reddit is already dead. The whole point in all of this is to be another mindless zombie platform. The native app and nu(ked) reddit were already like this. Now you won't be able to search and find anything anywhere on the internet unless you are escorted there by an algorithm.
Eh, this was already the case on Reddit to an extent, but the point is moderators really carried the platform on their backs and if many of them really do leave then Reddit will collapse as a useful platform with actual discussion.
Reddit without niche subs would probably become a aggregate for tiktok, Instagram, and Twitter videos. Which it has been trending towards when it comes to what reddit displays to users as default.
Speaking of: Remember when YouTube was good? When your feed showed you your actual subscriptions, the earlier algorithm was showing you stuff you actually want to see and not 6 late night shows, an ad for YouTube TV, and maybe a decent video essay or two?
that's why we should be spreading the word about the fediverse
I think the big Mastodon push last year has made things a little bit easier for Lemmy. Basic awareness of the fediverse has broken into the mainstream of social media, rather than being a niche interest of Free Software enthusiasts.
Now that Lemmy's gotten this initial nudge of mainstream support, I'll be far more engaged here than I ever was on Reddit.
There are enough people posting to see a fresh dozen or so posts an hour my Subscribed > New feed and I don't have a ton of subs, mostly STEM. Honestly a few days ago that was a crazy pipe dream. With this kind of mass threshold passed, we only need to expand the scope/quality of posts and this can be a permanent home that organically draws people to the platform. I think we need a page on the major instances that show the plans and limitations of those hosting the instance and where they need support. Like learning Ruud has a bunch of other federated .world servers and seeing his remarkable ability to handle scale makes me much more confident to be here.
people will have to stick around for this to work though, if the honeymoon period is over and perhaps spez stops being such a knob, people could disappear just as quickly as they appeared
No doubt it will cool off some here, but I like this more and it seems like some others feel the same. I don't think there will be any going back because it won't be the same reddit ever again.
the signal to noise ratio is much higher here, so far
If our success depends on Spez not being a knob then our future is already more secure than most.
Well, as long as I don't have the Reddit app installed and I can't use my 3rd party apps + I have the Jerboa app under my thumb, it will become my default quickly (it already has now, as I removed 3rd party apps from my home screen).
I wonder how many people will do the same when their 3rd party app does not work.
This may seem a tad ironic since I'm posting here in the fediverse, but I think we should also be encouraging a variety of alternative, self-hostable options, e.g. Postmill (similar to reddit but not federated), Discourse (more of a classic forum structure but with some modernizations), etc.
Not everyone will want to try to figure out federation/ActivityPub, and that's okay, because there are more options that folks can spin up. The fediverse, imo, benefits as much from other self-hosted sites as it does from those that connect with it.