Fediverse

My opinion on it is pretty simple:

• I'm here to read posts by and talk to humans, and a post made by a human somewhere else and copied over by a bot without said human's knowledge or consent is not "made by a human" anymore as far as I'm concerned.
• I don't f*cking care about the size of the Fediverse above a certain threshold, and we have reached that imo. There are great posts and discussions here already, so it's fine if it attracts more people and it's fine if it doesn't. The important bit imo is that the people who join do so because they understand and care about the platform's goals and ethos, not just because it has the biggest potential audience.
• Communities mainly populated by bots feel like grotesque ghost towns. Answering a post and later realizing it was made by a bot makes you feel tricked and deceived. Your posts being copied to another social network by a bot impersonating you feels cheap and desperate, and like your rights are being seriously violated (which is probably the case)! This all could very well give Lemmy the bad rep of being the "fake bot social network".
• On the big plan behind it, who the hell would want to or should take over a Lemmy account from an instance that's widely known to be populated by bots, maybe even blocked or defederated for that reason?! That's pretty much the worst entrance to the Fediverse you could have, almost guaranteeing a bad experience from the get go!

So by all means advertise Lemmy outside of the Fediverse, but don't fill it with bot content just to make it look like one of the big social networks on first glance. Imo it will do much more harm than good, because you alienate the people already here and you give it a bad rep in the outside world.

One thing I hate about it is the posting of reddit questions. Several times I've tried to help someone having some sort of an issue only to realize the question was originally posted on reddit and the poster is not even on the fediverse, nor will they probably ever see it. It's a waste of time and effort, and certain subs are already becoming a graveyard of unanswered questions with no value to anyone.

To me that's not adding "content" it's simply cluttering the fediverse with garbage from a site many of us left behind on purpose. Reddit sucks, why bring it here?

Eliminate all bots.

Crossposts are useless because the communities are not interactive.

The strength of the Lemmy community in my opinion is the high quality of discussion, and there is no discussion to be had on reddit reposts when we are not having our content reposted onto reddit.

also, what about alternative front-ends like LibReddit, or archive websites?

Alternative reddit front ends like teddit always explicitly state that they do not host any content. They do that for a reason.

Archives are noncommercial and noninteractive, which falls under fair use, and they also comply with DMCA takedowns.

I agree that people should treat each other with respect. For those who doesn't understand, this is a good post. Perhaps I can elaborate on "the other side", or at least my side, and people could perhaps understand why people disagree with the mirroring?

As most of you probably know, the network effect prevents most of the users of an existing platform to switch to another one. “Why would I go there where there will be no one, when all the people I want to interact with are here?”

I don't want to interact with people who need a crowd. I want to interact with those who want to discuss my favorite topics. There's a healthy lack of shitpost and joke comments on Lemmy outside of the shitposting and joke communities. I like that. I want that to continue. I think it's due to the lemmy crowd being different from the reddit crowd.

It was the case for Mastodon until Twitter started to really become mediocre

Yes, the good ol' days as I remember them. Filled with anti-censorship and freedom loving people willing to put their principles of a free internet above having a sheepish crowd of followers. Now I don't use Mastodon that often.

We might be in a “next year is the year of the Linux Desktop”

Try looking at it from the perspective of people like me who have been using Linux for years or decades - Who cares about "the year of the Linux desktop"?

admins complaining about the system resources consumed by alien.top instances, “as much as the largest instances”. Does that mean that if tomorrow reddit.old dies, we double or triple the number of users on Lemmy, instances would have to be shutdown?

Yes, or take "drastic" measures like blocking whole instances or migrating data to external storage. My previous home instance got overloaded due to lack of proper admin tools and literally had to shut down due to a lack of storage space during the reddit influx.

but should we be worried that Lemmy will hit a scalability ceiling at some point?

Cries of help, "I'm out of space", from admins of smaller instances comes up in various support communites every so often. It's not a scalability issue if you have the funds to just increase resources. So yes and no IMO.

Parenting, personal finance, relationship advice, fashion advice are topics that aren't very popular on Lemmy... due to the network effect.

No, no. It's because we're almost entirely basement-dwelling nerds who are alone, have no kids, no money, and only wear clothes to avoid the shame of other people seeing our naked bodies.

I simply don't understand what this fediverser thing is supposed to accomplish.

So apparently it is "eventually" supposed to let Reddit and Lemmy users interact with each other. And this will somehow cause people to join Lemmy? If someone is a reddit user, posting in Reddit where 99% of the community is, and they happen to see a comment from Lemmy, why would they even care? Why would they leave their community with 99% of the people to move to a smaller inactive community that only has any action at all due to copying content from the site that they are already on? It doesn't make any sense!

And if that sad state of affairs is the eventual goal for the project, what is it accomplishing right now, other than annoying people with bot spam? If you want to read Reddit threads, go read Reddit. There is no reason to spam your personal reddit rss feed to the world. And what is even the purpose for it creating user accounts, which is basically impersonating people?

I think it basically boils down to 1 question. Is it currently accomplishing its goal of bringing actual new users to Lemmy, in any measurable way. If that answer is anything other than "yes", then why is it enabled in the first place? If that answer is "yes", then there are still a whole host of reasons why that might not be a good thing.

I got an invite to Blue Sky and realized why fediverse is great. Blue Sky already has the annoying kind of people that are on Twitter. We had those in fediverse, but they were all in some instances. Unfederated them and we are good. I don't think the objective here is to get big as reddit, twitter, etc. I feel so much better having a small community that interacts with me and makes sense to me. It would be great having more people in fediverse as well, but the amount now is fine for me.

resource use across most fediverse software seems excessive due to the immaturity of the platforms. efficiency takes time, and the activity pub protocol is pretty new. efficient implementation is pretty rare.

buckle up, it could be awhile. i've been running an instance (K/mbin) now since july, resource use is my biggest issue.

I haven’t seen the alien.top stuff yet, but I had a friend that was working on a reddit bridge project that implements api over html for old reddit and new reddit. The idea was that you could target the api and make the client compatible with both reddit and lemmy. (The API is similar to Lemmy’s)

I got to play with it before he shelved it, and it worked great.

This seems like a better approach than the one they are trying to take.

Lemmy also needs a mechanism for linking your reddit user id (and twitter, and…) with your active lemmy id so users can find each other easier. I am surprised we don’t already have this with mastodon. Twiiter oauth is (used to be? I haven’t touched it in a couple years ) like a 5 minute thing to implement. Reddit apparently also supports oauth.

If you can sign into lemmy via a reddit login path, you could also do some other fun/interesting stuff.

Regardless, I don’t really see a need for any of it.

Lemmy has its own set of issues to deal with.

I do respect the human involvement, respect them enough in fact to expect them to reflect on the ramifications of their actions/creation.

Some LinkedIn tech bro who's trying to get enough venture capital to boil the oceans using some overwrought genAI bullshit to create electoral campaign material is also "a human", but being willing to create that horrid output with its consequences leaves both the product and producer open to critique

Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn't work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: [email protected]

As someone who has created two communities here in the Fediverse hoping they could ever draw attention and function as alternatives to Reddit, I have to simply say that I can't do all the work alone. It's good that someone is trying to bring in more content, even if it means bringing it from Reddit. Other people don't like it? They're welcome to fix it another way so long as it's fixed. Otherwise niche communities will be all but forced to return to Reddit, as the statistics of stuff like "lirker vs poster" only ever benefit the most common topics, the largest instances, and sex / porn.

Also I honestly don't understand why people are stoning their chests that the content is not "human produced". Like, what are you trying to get at? It's link aggregation, and in the end it doesn't matter if the content was craftingly handwritten by a human who then walked to the Lemmy offices to retype it on the server's keyboard - what matters is whether the entities who answer / comment on the post are humans or not. A reasonable fraction of content on Reddit is literally links to elsewhere and left there for people to comment on them - heck, it's the entire point of some subreddits such as the news ones. Even in the cases where some introductory text or inviting commentary is posted alongside the link, the thing to comment on still requires going elsewhere to check anyway.

tl;dr: paraphrasing from what that sergeant from Starship Troopers said, "You are my content provider until you stop or I find someone better".