I skipped Fark, but my progression is largely the same. Once in a blue moon, I still visit Slashdot. It's like checking up on an ex to see how they're doing.
this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
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Technology
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It'll be great to see more people showing up on Lemmy.
People are so confused and overwhelmed about the fediverse mechanics though.
Maybe there is room for a product that is an aggregator for aggregators. Like, a centralised service that scrapes and collects all Lemmy instances into one super instance.
Its actually simple. Tell them, its like Email. You have an email account at gmail, but can perfectly fine have email conversation with someone on outllook. Lemmy instance = the same as a web email interface of any email provider. Most people will get their head around that.
As soon as you have to explain the fediverse to someone using analogies my experience is that most people have already given up. They just can’t be bothered to learn something new.
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I don't think such an aggregator is required. Interoperability is smooth enough that you don't have to think about different instances most of the time. I've only really noticed two points that would be confusing:
- the sign up process
- the "local"/"all" distinction
So I think what we really need to do to make this platform intuitive to people that aren't already familiar with it is:
- Somehow streamline signing up. The process from googling Lemmy to having an account on an instance should not be confusing or intimidating.
- Filter by "all" by default. The default should cater to the users which are less likely to figure it out themselves. If you don't understand what instances are and what "local" vs "all" means, then you are probably here for the "all" experience. If you understand and really want "local" you are probably fine having to set it yourself.
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Gonna be honest it's kinda weird to me as someone who did just move over that there's a bunch of posts from people who just found the Fediverse claiming it as home while there's people who have been here since it's creation. It's got the implication that this was created as some sort of next jump from Reddit which doesn't really seem to be the case from my perspective.
I bet some early Redditors felt the same way about the Digg refugees.
That feeling makes sense, but I think everyone knows that the Fediverse wasn't created specifically to give them a landing in this event, just like Reddit wasn't created to catch the Digg refugees, etc. More of a "next phase in the evolution of this concept", and while it took a catastrophe, they're ready to consider that it's time to move on now.
The trick is going to be walking that line between preserving what made the Fediverse great and not alienating the newcomers. I think there's room for everyone, though, and really the big advantage of the Fediverse - we don't have to agree to co-exist, and can even co-existing completely separately if needed.
I think you bring up a pretty important point about federation in that it allows for and even encourages expansion in some ways, so that's a good way to keep optimistic about it. I guess I just feel a little embarrassed. Especially when you look at posts like the recent one asking Lemmy users how they feel about the reddit refugees, and it's flooded with responses from Reddit refugees instead offering unsolicited feedback about design choices. Then you have threads like this with people laying claim to the fediverse more or less. It just feels like some kind of a Christopher Columbus situation. While I realize that might be a little tone-deaf it's the best analogy I have for it.
Any community is a sum of it's members, good bad, or otherwise. I think there will be a wave of us Reddit refugees, but also word is going to spread to other places like Meta and hopefully bring in even more people. Getting people sorted into servers that are going to be able to handle the load, or even better getting them to host their own servers is going to be the way to go. Sorry if we're stumbling all over your garden in the meantime.
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I see what you mean to an extent, and I also just moved over, but it's worth remembering that Digg -> Reddit was the same afaik. Like Reddit had been around and established for a decent amount of time before the fall of Digg. (This is second-hand info because I wasn't around at the time)
I've been on reddit for a couple years before the flood from Digg. The quality of content and especially comments went down right then, and never recovered.
Personally I skipped Digg entirely.
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I realise that this is unpopular. But personally while I disagree with the decision to charge (exorbitantly) for the api and appalled at the slander hurled at the dev, I think that is an business choice and one more item that I have to disagree and live with.
But I am very excited about the rise of the fediverse. I know that a company will eventually make a decision that I feel very passionately about, but I will be stuck making a difficult choice. With the fediverse, it provides the users with the opportunity to have control. This power of course often comes with various other costs (lack of a dedicated sre or moderation teams, etc). But I expect that over time this will evolve into options where paid offerings will come up that allows for higher QoS where required.
Honestly, if spez hadn't already sold the site to white supremacists, I'd be a lot quicker to defend this.
The api changes really were about protecting their gold mine of data from ai data models scraping for data. Reddit wants to use that data to create its own models and then replace moderators with those models. The ultimate goal here is to turn the existing dataset into an automoderator on steroids that they could sell anywhere. Trouble is someone else is going to beat them to it.
There was a reason these changes lined up so nicely with Google doing the same thing. Everyone's realizing they've been spouting their gold from firehoses for any machine to pick up, and they're being reactionary and turning them off asap instead of just like, accepting it as a facet of having a public social network.
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Renegade BBSes -> IRC -> slashdot -> digg -> reddit -> imgur -> discord -> mastadon -> lemmy
with plenty of side quests along the way
Pre search engine time on Geocities trading mutual linking on each other websites, reams and reams of messages and emails
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I had the same journey but I'm pretty sure I found Slashdot by way of boingboing which I found by way of Diesel Sweeties blog posts when I first got a DSL connection in 2002 and was looking for comics and blogs to fill up my trendy new RSS reader lol
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Tried the official Reddit app today and boy people weren't joking when they say it sucks. I thought it'd just be the usual experience plus some ads but I was totally wrong.
The official app doesn't respect your subreddit subscriptions at all, instead force feeding you feeds of whatever their algorithm thinks will drive maximum engagement just like a shit version of Facebook. The "hot" etc functionality is completely stipped from it entirely.
Guess I'm here to stay on the fediverse now.
What absolutely sucks about this is that I had carefully curated my subscriptions on RIF in order not to exacerbate my dumb mental health issues.
Hell, I've read angry posts about people in recovery from addiction and alcohol saying how they keep seeing ads for beer or gambling and things like that.
It's horrifying!!
The algorithm really doesn't work when you are critical or sceptical over a subject. For instance crypto sceptics from r/buttcoin being shown binance ads. Yes, they do show an interest in crypto, but may be the least suceptible persons to that ad.
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people in recovery from addiction and alcohol saying how they keep seeing ads for beer or gambling
Not that this is how it works, but I imagine a diligent algorithm looking at those individuals and that content, and then thinking "mhhmm this will generate maximum revenue!!".
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Digg -> Reddit -> Lemmy
After experiencing the death of two "power to the people" platforms due to profit-driven VC-backed corporate meddling, here's hoping the third platform is the charm Lemmy & the fediverse.
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It's funny to read this article about the death of Digg again:
In reality, Digg changed their business model and pretended that they didn’t. That is something that is unacceptable with communities and won’t be forgotten. Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian hit the nail on the head in an open letter to (now former) Digg CEO – Kevin Rose:
“You chose to grow with venture capital and you’ve no doubt (I hope) taken some money off the table in your Series C round. I say this because this new version of digg reeks of VC meddling. It’s cobbling together features from more popular sites and departing from the core of digg, which was to “give the power back to the people.”
https://searchengineland.com/digg-v4-how-to-successfully-kill-a-community-50450>
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The Fediverse seems like an interesting idea, but I hope it actually holds together.
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So many long forgotten relics and old friends lost to time.
bbs, usenet, irc, aol chat rooms, aim/icq/msn messenger (by the way, anyone remember Trillian?), geocities web-rings, various phpBB forums (shoutout neopages), oekaki drawing boards, livejournal, stumbleupon,
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Same fucking journey as you. Reddit was a good run for 10 years, let's see if Lemmy can work.
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